Multicultural Malice: A Warning Against Good Faith
17th September 2023
When the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ campaign broke out in Oxford, Nigel Biggar rose to the occasion and engaged the ‘decolonising’ agitators in a public debate. He now admits to having been a little more naïve back in 2015 than he is today. For one thing, he seemed to think that this was a good faith discussion about history. Yet the leader of the Rhodes Must Fall side made it clear within the first minute of his speech that the Cecil Rhodes statue outside Oriel College, Oxford, is not a stand-alone offence, but just one “emblem” among many of an inexpungeable guilt, a totemic symbol of a civilisation that was built on white supremacy. Europe, he added, is still plagued by the legacy of this original sin, to the ‘systemic’ disadvantage of non-Europeans who for some reason continue to cross the Mediterranean in vast numbers to reach this irredeemably racist hellhole.
This must have caught Biggar off-guard, for he showed up to the debate armed with more old-fashioned weapons—things like facts, figures, even quotes from Rhodes himself, none of which his opponents bothered to rebut. “Thus did I stumble, blindly, into the Imperial History Wars,” he recalls in his splendid book, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning. Biggar won the debate by Socratic standards, but not by the sophistical ones operative on the other side and, regrettably it seems, in the packed Oxford Union audience as well. This begs the question: what really motivated this enthusiastic crowd, and what motivates others like them, if not a noble hunger for the vicarious experience and practical wisdom that knowledge of history confers?