Nigel Biggar, author, most recently, of The New Dark Age, was a liberal Oxford professor who got mugged by reality.
As an ordained Church of England priest and University of Oxford theology professor, he read both the left-leaning Guardian and the centre-right Times. He voted for Tony Blair’s New Labour and for the Remain side in the 2016 referendum to leave the European Union. While not a leftist, he remained well within the bounds of Oxford’s narrow, progressive-slanted Overton Window of acceptability. He was well-published and respected, an academic normie.
That all changed when Biggar’s rosy view of his famous university collided with the new cancel culture of the Great Awokening. Biggar, as an Englishman born to a Scottish father and English mother, strongly opposed Scottish separatism during the referendum of 2014. During the debate, the left-nationalist “Yes” campaign presented Scotland as a plucky underdog throwing off the shackles of an oppressive British Empire. The Empire was viewed exclusively through a Manichaean postcolonial leftist lens. In this progressive narrative, Scots should cast off the shame of the imperial past by voting Yes, thereby recovering their innocence and moral legitimacy.
The prolific Biggar had written nine books in under 30 years while teaching full-time as a professor and serving as an Anglican priest. An ethicist and philosopher, Biggar’s oeuvre had concerned itself with high-level questions such as Karl Barth’s ethics, natural law, or the morality of nationalism and war. During the Scottish referendum, however, the Yes side’s demonization of Britain’s Empire prompted Biggar to become interested in rescuing an even-handed account of it. In July 2017, together with imperial historian John Darwin, he established a 5-year research project, Ethics and Empire, to evaluate Britain’s imperial record—not against the yardstick of perfection, but in relation to the history of other world empires. Rather than impose a twenty-first-century progressive lens on history, Biggar and Darwin wanted to know how the inhabitants of empires understood their civilization in their own moral terms.
In November of that year, Biggar wrote an article in the Times arguing for a more balanced appraisal of Britain’s colonial record. In December, he penned an online description of his research project on the Oxford website, claiming that it would not be adopting the postcolonialist position that empire “has always and everywhere been an illegitimate form of political organization.” Biggar had innocently assumed that facts, debate and logic would hold sway over ideology and emotional blackmail inside the hallowed halls of Oxford. Within a week, that prelapsarian faith in professionalism was shredded by the woke woodchipper.
Elected governments are scrutinized in the media and can be voted out whereas private censorship in undemocratic institutions such as universities can pass under the radar for decades.
A bit of background: in 2015, the Rhodes Must Fall movement arrived at Oxford, home of the Rhodes Scholars, and student activists agitated to remove Rhodes’s statue from Oriel College. In January 2016, after a backlash from alumni and donors, and in the context of a Conservative government and robust criticism of the students in the press, Oxford announced, to the anguish of the students, that the statue would remain. In June, Britain voted to leave the European Union, stunning left-wing environments like Oxford. Then, in November, Donald Trump was elected US president. At the same time, the advent of the smartphone and social media was spreading woke ideology—the sacralization of race, gender and sexuality—with its fetishization of emotional trauma. Young elite students, disproportionately female, formed its shock troops.
This tsunami of emotional fervour made short work of Biggar’s fastidious logic and evidence. The old academic rules just did not apply. The queen bee of therapeutic totalitarianism at Oxford, Priyamvada Gopal, a Cambridge University postcolonial and critical race theorist, screeched to her thousands of Twitter followers: “OMG, this is serious shit. … We need to SHUT THIS DOWN … The British empire was constitutively racist … Ergo, today’s apologists—including Nigel Biggar—are racists.” Gopal’s intervention scared up some 200 acolytes, as well as 58 of Biggar’s Oxford colleagues, who signed two separate open letters calling for the project to be terminated. While the pro-free speech vice-chancellor of the University, Louise Richardson, commendably stood up for Biggar’s academic freedom, his colleague John Darwin scandalously deserted the project. Two years later, Biggar was told by a colleague that he was still regarded by Oxford’s history faculty as a “pariah.”
Soon after Biggar was protested at Oxford, I became involved in writing a think tank report which informed the new Conservative government’s Academic Freedom Act. In 2019, Biggar’s Oxford center organized a small, unannounced, invite-only conference on academic freedom, which I attended along with a number of dissident academics and anti-woke personalities such as Musa al-Gharbi, Douglas Murray, and Konstantin Kisin. Biggar was emerging as a key figure in the nascent academic freedom movement in Britain and increasingly in the public eye.
Cancel culture was not finished with him. After his high-profile troubles at Oxford, he was approached by Bloomsbury, a major publisher, to write a book on colonialism. He delivered the manuscript thirty months later, on New Year’s Eve, 2020. His editor was pleased, describing the book as a work of “major importance” which would sell 15,000-20,000 copies. But Biggar’s manuscript followed the “racial reckoning” after the killing of George Floyd, which fired the left-liberal imagination across the West. His death even prompted future Prime Minister Keir Starmer and current leadership hopeful Angela Rayner to join Nancy Pelosi in taking the knee. As if on cue, three months later, an email arrived from one Sarah Broadway, head of Special Interest publishing at Bloomsbury, who wrote that “conditions are not currently favourable” for the book’s publication. She later added that this was due to “public feeling.” The book was to be postponed for a year. Biggar was free, she urged, to shop his book around to others.
Biggar was subsequently informed that Bloomsbury’s volte-face had been spurred by young woke staffers who protested at being made to work on a book they abhorred. This was around the same time that staff at Random House Canada were breaking into tears at having to work on Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life. Biggar took his book elsewhere, but not before replying to Bloomsbury that “the public feeling that concerns you is that of—for want of a more scientific term—the ‘woke’ Left. This is an illiberal movement that agitates to suppress the expression of any views that offend it.” The book was subsequently acquired by William Collins, published in 2023 as Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, and went on to sell 60,000 copies, a staggering success for a dense work of quasi-academic non-fiction.
Colonialism took a factual scythe to the overblown claims of the postcolonialists and critical race theorists. Carefully argued, it did not deny the sins of British imperialism, but urged the reader to compare apples to apples (i.e., other empires), rather than to utopia. On this score, Britain’s empire earned a better report card than virtually any other. It expended considerable blood and treasure suppressing the slave trade while dealing more ethically and juridically with conquered peoples than most other conquerors. His subsequent 2025 work, Reparations: Slavery and the Tyranny of Imaginary Guilt, continued to tackle progressive misinformation on the postcolonial front of the culture wars.
The New Dark Age is a short read, the third act in Biggar’s anti-woke trilogy. While it contains plenty of content on colonialism that will be familiar to his readers, it is less an ethics of empire than an ethics of the academy. The reason we misconceive the British Empire, the author argues, is because universities have abandoned their ethos of respectful deliberation, analytic logic, and shared research methods in the face of an emotionally aggressive cultural left ideology. The book points to a range of fronts in the culture war—free speech, gender, race, empire—to argue that these are not trivial but cut to the core of our enlightened civilization. “The present culture wars over transgender identity, racism and colonial history are neither artificial nor trivial,” he writes, remarking that their outcome will have important ramifications for the wellbeing of children, the harmony of race relations and the survival and confidence of Western nations.
The skeptical reader might ask what can be learned from another book on campus cancel culture. Yet The New Dark Age confounds the skeptics by opening up new dimensions in our understanding of identity politics and what to do about it.
Biggar’s qualitative approach does not back a clear horse when it comes to classic “critical woke studies” questions such as whether woke derives from true belief or self-interest, top-down edict or bottom-up activism, coordinated action or unplanned contagion. Much of the book’s diagnostic chapters chronicle his disappointment at the cravenness of leaders and professors who fail to stand up to the “passionate self-righteousness” and “repressive aggression” of the ideologues. Drawing on the Nazi case, he views the modern university as a “bystander society” that lacks the intestinal fortitude to resist obvious evil. Far easier to bury one’s head in research, look the other way and hope the monster leaves you alone.
On the other hand, there are both historical and personal examples of more active and sinister university influence. Biggar elsewhere writes about the fact that German university students were twice as likely as the population to support the Nazis. And Biggar’s original contract for New Dark Age was killed by pressure from idealistic young staffers. Activists, he argues, are believers in a “deformed” post-Christian religion which divides the world into good and evil while stoking moral righteousness. Later in the book, Biggar remarks that cultural leftists become emotionally attached to their arguments and that his progressive critics subordinate their professional ethics in the service of ideological point-scoring. University leaders, meanwhile, are often captured by “superficially plausible” ideas like diversity, inclusion, respect, equity, and anti-racism. Such leaders, he adds, “worship an image of themselves as progressive” and “fiercely defend that accumulation of social and professional capital.” This suggests that true belief and ideological identity are the principal drivers of the Critical Social Justice juggernaut.
While the book lends texture to our understanding of the psychology of progressive illiberalism, its most important contribution is bringing Biggar’s well-tuned ethical ear to bear on the problem of the university. He uses his and others’ experiences of cancellation to make the case that the academy has abandoned its scholarly ethics. In a manner similar in spirit to Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott’s The Canceling of the American Mind, he enumerates the bad faith tactics and logical fallacies of contemporary illiberal progressives: “Smearing by association, authoritarian pulling of professional rank, misrepresentation, the setting up of straw men, unjust bias, false assertion, dogmatic ideological abstraction, and evasive omission.” He defines passions as emotions that are out of control, observing that we inhabit a culture that vaunts passion as a sign of authenticity and vitality. Such emotions “blind and deafen us” and are typically based on misperceptions. The Nazis, for instance, were authentically passionate about Jews, but their “passions lied,” based as they were on misperceptions.
The New Dark Age is a highly readable and powerful book that enjoins academics and writers to renew their commitment to the classical liberal virtues of reason and civil debate.
Biggar counsels a return to a professional ethic of emotional restraint, respect and reason, in which scholars and writers adopt the principle of charity by offering the benefit of the doubt to their interlocutors, whether in person or in print. This presumes a universalist ethic focusing on the equal treatment of individuals, even if “privileged,” which trumps the woke ethic of priority treatment for totemic protected groups. Universities should make it clear that equal treatment should prevail. Instead, Oxford and other elite universities pretend there is no tension between academic values and social justice while, in the breach, they often prioritize the latter. Until that changes, he continues, we will remain trapped in an intellectual dark age.
The New Dark Age makes a powerful case for intellectual honesty and the renewal of professional virtues in academia. Religious conviction, he adds, can help to inject a sense of forgiveness and humility into the conversation, reminding us that we are all flawed and must be charitable and patient toward those with whom we disagree. Biggar takes the controversial view that the bright side of woke excess is that it marks the return of the university as a moral force in society that can help to shape the character of its students. He admits that we will not agree about the choice of virtues, but that institutional leaders will have to “shoulder the risk of existential and moral commitments.” The virtues he favours are those of Socratic dialogue, charity, respect, and intellectual honesty. The risk, of course, is that the wrong virtues will prevail—yet Biggar does not believe that value neutrality is an option.
This is a powerful message for academics, university leaders, and writers more generally. However, given human nature and the state of our culture, the reader may quibble that something more than moral exhortation is required. While Biggar the ethicist strictly engages in the battle of ideas, the question of whether governments should intervene in universities is vital. Most academics are on the left, and of these, most support affirmative action, diversity statements, and other aspects of DEI. In addition, the background music of our public morality is rooted in taboos pertaining to race, sex, and, to some degree, sexual orientation. Progressive tripwires can produce what John McWhorter terms “social death” while killing a professional reputation. This endows even small numbers of activists with enormous social power. As a classical liberal realist, I believe that government intervention is necessary to protect individual freedom from corrupt, censorious institutions. Elected governments are scrutinized in the media and can be voted out, whereas private censorship in undemocratic institutions such as universities can pass under the radar for decades.
The actions of Republican federal and state governments in the United States suggest that scrutinizing academic content while deploying financial carrots and sticks changes incentives, prompting universities to reform. University leaders and trustees can also take the lead in pushing back against the self-replicating biases of the faculty. Biggar bemoans the weakening of academic senates in relation to administrators, but if the problem stems from academics, as I believe it does, the only hope for internal reform lies with university leaders interfering in the hiring process by refusing to approve certain hires while opening up heterodox tenure lines that go against faculty wishes. In this case, greater academic independence is an obstacle rather than a pathway to reform. While state and management control can be a threat to academic freedom, as we see in authoritarian countries and in the harmful cuts proposed by DOGE, moderate and calibrated intervention remains the only realistic means of rescuing contemporary academia.
The New Dark Age is a highly readable and powerful book that enjoins academics and writers to renew their commitment to the classical liberal virtues of reason and civil debate. Let us hope that academics and university administrators take it to heart.
