On Our New Dark Age

What we must know about academia and the culture wars:

I have said before that the British academic and ethicist Nigel Biggar is one of the most important Christian thinkers of our time. And I have already looked at some of his important volumes, including the following:

In Defence of War (Oxford University Press, 2013)
What’s Wrong with Rights? (Oxford University Press, 2020)
Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning (William Collins, 2023)
Reparations: Slavery and the Tyranny of Imaginary Guilt (Forum Press, 2025)

For more on the man and his work, see this piece: https://billmuehlenberg.com/2025/12/12/getting-to-know-nigel-biggar/

Here I discuss his brand-new book, The New Dark Age (Polity, 2026). The volume is brief enough to be read in one sitting, but it nonetheless packs a solid and fully-detailed punch. The book is about the culture wars, something I have long been involved in. Indeed, this week CultureWatch turned 20: https://billmuehlenberg.com/2026/04/05/twenty-years-of-culturewatch/

Biggar argues that woke Western institutions – especially our universities – have been at the forefront of fomenting chaos and confusion as they promote the culture wars. When universities go bad, then societies go bad. He writes: “Universities are, arguably, the most culturally strategic of a society’s institutions. They form the minds of graduates, who, now more that ever, go on to lead and manage the rest of society.”

Those of us fighting back are simply responding to the ongoing offensive of the left. Biggar assures us that these wars are taking a toll on those not willing to go along with the latest trendy woke nostrums. Thus the gay feminist philosopher Kathleen Stock felt compelled to resign from the University of Sussex for daring to critique transgender ideology.

And Biggar has had a long run-in with those who put radical ideology ahead of scholarship and truth. He has already recounted some of this in his 2023 volume listed above. Says Biggar: “The fact is that the culture wars are neither artificial nor trivial. They are real and important, and much is at stake in them.” He goes on to say this:

The first thing at stake is freedom of speech. And if freedom of speech, then also of thought, because what we dare not say out loud becomes, over time, too burdensome to carry on thinking. There is no doubt that the freedom to voice perfectly reasonable thoughts about transgender identity, race and colonial history has come under threat and been constrained in recent years….

 

What is at stake is the liberal temper of culture and politics. For that to survive, we need liberal citizens who have the strengths of character — the virtues — that make them capable of responding to alien viewpoints thoughtfully and civilly. Universities have an enormously important civic responsibility to help student-citizens grow such virtues. But that is not a duty that academic institutions are generally inclined to own.

As mentioned, Biggar knows all about this for daring to make the case that the British have much to be proud of about their past, and that taking a black armband approach to history helps no one. So Biggar spends some time here dealing with the matter of postcolonialism, a virulent form of postmodernism that has arisen in recent years:

This specifies modernity, with its faith in reason and science, as European or Western, and condemns the use of colonial power in the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to impose it on the rest of the world. It regards colonialism as nothing but a litany of racism, oppression and exploitation, from which indigenous American, African and Asian peoples continue to suffer. Accordingly, it seeks to `decolonize’ Western institutions, not least universities, by dismantling `Eurocentricity’, substituting nonwhite authors for white ones, and granting indigenous `ways of knowing’ an intellectual status equal to that of modern, European reason. Thus, for example, in New Zealand’s school classrooms Maori creation myths are now taught alongside modern physics and chemistry as equal in scientific status.

The experiences of Biggar and others in this regard are recounted in various places here, making it clear that to seek to challenge the reigning woke narrative is to place oneself in real jeopardy. And it is not just in universities, but in publishing houses and in other institutions where these culture wars entail a war on truth and reality itself.

But it is our universities that especially have become dangerous places for those who dare to have differing views on the prevailing wisdom or the official orthodoxy. Biggar reminds us that back in the early 1930s the Nazi regime received twice as much support from university students than it did from the German population at large.

While there were different reasons why young people could so strongly embrace Nazism, Biggar says that “a general predilection for Nazi ideas were nourished by a prevailing intellectual culture whose repudiation of reason is disturbingly reminiscent of today’s postmodernism”.

Activist academics have much to answer for here. We know that the modern Western university is a hot house for leftism and anti-Western values. And just as many German academics last century did not want to rock the boat, so too today.

Reputations, careers and salaries are at stake, and simply going along with the prevailing insanities is an option too many are willing to take. That is a good part of our problem today. Biggar asks what the remedy to this might be:

At base, conflict-averse academics need to muster the courage to do their civic duty to defend liberal culture on campus. And since love is the mother of courage, they need to wake up and appreciate the value of what is at stake, namely, the future of a free society whose members feel able to challenge and test false orthodoxies, lest, in prevailing, they harm human beings.

 

Those individuals who, for whatever reason — tenure, seniority, temperament, moral sensitivity — feel able to take the risks of speaking out, must do so. For, without doubt, they will give courage to others, at least by showing that they are not alone in harbouring dissident doubts. Otherwise:

 

“If each person is looking to the person next to them to figure out what to do, and no one wants to be seen as the person who overreacts (and risks feeling foolish and embarrassed), the person in need may receive no help at all. The members of the group may all collectively assume that because others are not reacting, there is no emergency … Each person may privately believe an emergency is in fact occurring, while publicly they show no concern.” [quoting from Mary Fulbrook, Bystander Society: Conformity and Complicity in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust]

 

That is all true. Nevertheless, while exemplary individuals may plant the seeds of resistance, whether those seeds will germinate depends on the fertility of the institutional environment.

The sad truth is, most of the humanities departments in our universities today are given over to a hatred of the West – and of truth. That would certainly be the case with historians who prefer historical revisionism to historical accuracy. Biggar looks at how so many academics use their positions to denounce the West and its past while they rewrite history. As he states:

[H]istorians, like the rest of us, are moral beings. Inevitably, they have moral views, those views will shape their political commitments and those commitments might well subtly inform their interpretation of the historical data – say, what they choose to focus on or what adjectives they choose to use for description. Therefore, I think it’s generally better, more honest, more self-aware and more self-disciplined for historians to be up-front about their moral and political views rather than to allow them to operate covertly, where neither the historian nor the reader can keep a watchful eye on them. Thus, fully aware of their own moral and political prejudices, scrupulous historians will be capable of letting them be governed – even challenged and corrected – by evidence of the whole truth.

Assessing the problem is one thing. But Biggar offers us some hope in terms of seeking a major turnaround that is needed to reclaim our universities. He argues that the promotion of intellectual vice must be replaced by the promotion of intellectual virtue. He describes the former this way:

A vice is not just an error. Rather, it is a moral attitude, disposition or tendency. An intellectual vice is a tendency to think badly. Since it often involves the inaccurate, unfair or uncharitable handling of what others have said or written, it involves injustice towards them. Therefore, intellectual vice is not confined to the individual mind and does not stay in the lecture hall and seminar room. It is also a social vice that goes out and walks the streets.

A chapter is devoted to how this looks in practice, and then he goes on to look at intellectual virtue. He reminds us that all the early universities were as much interested in developing morally sound character in the student as in imparting knowledge. That has long gone by the wayside and needs to be resurrected.

Sure, there is a false sort of morality still be pushed today, but it is the woke version where students are taught to hate their own culture and their own history because of the supposed racism, exploitation and oppression that they are told the West is all about.

Biggar examines eight intellectual virtues that are needed if we are to restore Western universities to greatness and excellence. They are temperance (the restraint of emotions or passions); respect; carefulness; patience; charity; humility; teachableness; and courage.

If professors do not teach, model and embody these virtues, their opposites – their vices – will be. And then we will simply descend into a new Dark Age.

[1603 words]