359. Separating Good from Evil in the British Empire | Dr. Nigel Biggar

Hello everyone!

Today I have the privilege of conversing with Professor Nigel Bigger, a distinguished British theologian and ethicist. His controversial book, Colonialism, a moral reckoning was recently published and hit the nonfiction bestseller list in the UK. It's now available in North America and English language world. We discussed the ethics of the colonial enterprise.

the reality and falsehood of the idea of privilege, the purposeful and pointless miseries of council culture, and the separation of good from evil in the process of historical analysis.

So Nigel, we're going to talk today about your book, Colonialism, A Moral Reckoning, which has just been released just a few weeks ago, which, as I understand, is doing quite well. I would like maybe to start with the story of why it was that you got drawn into this historical

why you decided to write a history of this type. It's not precisely in your billowick as a professor. So why do you outline the circumstances that led to your undertaking this endeavor?

Yes, Jordan. So I'm an academic professor of ethics, of Christian ethics. And so over the years, I have been in the business of trying to make moral sense and come to moral judgments about complicated moral issues. For example, the moral problem of war

My first university degree and my first love has always been history, so all of my life I've read history. And I've been reading British Imperial history for 20, 30 years. And so moral questions that have been raised by European colonial endeavor around the world, especially the British effort have always interested me.

And so in 2015-16 there was a

agitation in Oxford imported from South Africa to have a statue of Cecil Rhodes, the late 19th century imperialist, which stands over Oxford's high street on the back of Oriel College, Oxford, to have it dismantled because it was said Rhodes was South Africa's Hitler. As it happens at the time, December 15, I was reading the standard biography of Cecil Rhodes. I thought to myself, no, that's just not true.

And so in early 2016, I published articles and I took part in a debate in the Oxford Union, opposing the dismantling of Rhodes' statue, because what was being projected onto him just seemed to me to be untrue. So that was my first, as it were, public performance on this issue. And then in 2017,

Pursuing my interest, I launched a research project here in Oxford called Ethics and Empire with a very eminent historian of empire globally, John Darwin. And the aim of the project was simply to look at how people across time from ancient China to the modern period, how they regarded the empires of their day in moral terms.

And then finally, in late November 2017, I published an article in the London Times in which I made what I thought was the completely unobjectionable, rather bland point that we British

We British can find both cause for shame and pride in our imperial history. And then about a few days later, I published online an account of the Ethics and Empire Project.

And as my wife and I were waiting at Heathrow Airport to fly to Germany to celebrate our wedding anniversary, I got word from the university that a group of students have published an online denunciation of me and my project. I thought nothing of it. Four days later, three days later, my historian collaborator abruptly resigned from the project.

And then within the space of five days, two more online denunciations appeared, one from 58 Oxford colleagues and the second from about 170 academics around the world. So that was my inadvertent adaptism of fire. I wasn't expecting it. I just pursued a research project. I thought it was interesting and important. And I published an article saying things that I thought to be true.

The content I've created over the past year represents some of my best to date, as I've undertaken additional extensive exploration in today's most challenging topics, and experienced a nice increment in production quality, courtesy of Daily Wire Plus.

We all want you to benefit from the knowledge gained throughout this adventurous journey. I'm pleased to let you know that for a limited time you're invited to access all my content with a seven-day free trial at Daily Wire Plus. This will provide you with full access to my new in-depth series on marriage as well as guidance for creating a life vision and my series exploring the book of Exodus.

You'll also find there the complete library of all my podcasts and lectures. I have a plethora of new content in development that will be coming soon exclusively on Daily Wire Plus. Voices of Reason and Resistance are few and far between these strange days. Click on the link below if you want to learn more. And thank you for watching and listening.

And that was, you said, that was in 2017, that all blew up already. December 17, that's right. So why did your collaborator, was that John Darwin who resigned? And if it was, why did, okay, so why did he resign? I mean, he had obviously thought through participating in this project. I presume, although you can fill us in that you were working well together and then he felt this was a worthwhile project.

Why and the fact that he withdrew obviously made things more difficult for you, at least that's how it looks from the outside. So what happened to Dr. Darwin and why did he feel compelled to take this route? Well, Jordan, I don't want to be liable to accusations of defamation here, so I want to be cautious.

Yes. So what John told me that weekend was that he had pressing personal problems and just felt he needed to withdraw. So I have some comments about that. So I've talked to about 200 people now who've undergone, let's say, a trial by fire of the sort that you describe.

Now, it's easy to pillory people who withdraw in the face of opposition. But my experience has been that most of the people, virtually all of the people that I know who've been subjected to this sort of treatment, react to it in a manner that's analogous to either facing a very protracted lawsuit or divorce or a very serious illness on their part or a serious illness on the part of someone close to them.

It's devastating. Jay Bhattacharya, for example, at Stanford, he was raped over the coals for his attitude toward, for his scientific discussion of the problem of the epidemic response and his skepticism about the COVID lockdown. He lost 35 pounds in three months. And I know other people who've ended up

well devastated sufficiently to receive psychiatric treatment and who've withdrawn into their own personal lives, who've been abandoned by their professional colleagues. It's absolutely brutally awful. And so it never surprises me when I hear that someone has in fact withdrawn when they've been mod because it's a stunningly effective tactic from the psychological perspective. And you said Dr. Darwin had indicated to you that

He was having trouble in his personal life at that point as well. And obviously, either couldn't tolerate or didn't need the stress. And that's interesting too, because lots of people

move forward professionally despite the fact that they're having all sorts of trouble, right? And then if you complicate that so that moving forward brings with it a tremendous psychological or personal cost, then you can bring the whole enterprise to a shuttering halt, which we seem to be hell bent on doing at the moment. So I have some sympathy for Dr. Darwin, but it put you in an awkward position because now your collaborator had disappeared.

I was stunned, frankly, and I didn't know what was happening, but I was stunned because our collaboration until that point had been very congenial and we were both very happy. We launched the project in July 17, it went very well.

I was aware there was a connection between this student protest and John's sudden abandonment of the project. It wasn't clear to me what it was. He said there were personal reasons.

Given the timing, that seemed to be less than the whole story. I was told by a third party that he did indeed have domestic concerns that were preoccupying him. But later I discovered on the obscure part of the Oxford University website, a statement by him saying that he had withdrawn for the project because its aims had changed.

I have to say, as far as I can see, that wasn't true. But to your point, I mean, my experience, not just with John, but with others too, even some very old and good friends, was that

one friend described the issue of colonialism as toxic. And as a consequence, he was involved in a research center. I run and he also withdrew. So my experience was of feeling as if I'd suddenly become diseased and people were stepping back. Right. Right.

Yeah. I think that's the right metaphor, you know, because I think the psychological mechanisms that underlie shunning and isolation are an extension of, they describe it as a, what would you say, as a consequence of the operation of the behavioral immune system. And people who are shunned are essentially

treated with contempt and derision as if they are infectious pathogens. Now, one of the things I learned, for example, I read a book called Hitler's Table Talk, and it was transcripts of his spontaneous discussions over meal times, over about a three-year period. I was very interested in

the psychology of contempt and derision. And Hitler never used language that was associated with fear in relationship to the Jews. You hear this notion that Hitler was afraid of the Jews, but that isn't the case is that the language he used was all parasite host language, contempt and derision. And it's a much more toxic emotion to have directed at you than fear because you destroy things that are pathogens, you burn them out, you show them no mercy.

and to be targeted with derision and disgust. As you said, you end up contaminated. It's about the worst thing that can happen to you socially.

Yeah, I think in the cases I'm talking about, I think it was more fair than discussed. Of course, I've had plenty of discussion, hatred and hostility directed from other quarters. In this case, it was more... I mean, I've... I accept now there are people out there who really, really, really hate what I say and think.

and therefore hate me. You know that, I know that. But the other phenomenon is of people who are friends or colleagues who don't hate you.

But I think that the more scared of what, the way I interpret it is, they step back from you because they're scared of what other people will think of them if they're associated with you. Well, they're afraid of becoming the target of that contempt because it's catchy. The fundamental problem is that you become a target of disgust and contempt and then people are afraid of being contaminated by that and thrown into the same

Absolutely. Another problem you had, I presume, is that in some ways you're the perfect poster boy for the kind of mobbing that might occur in relationship to colonialism, because while you're a professor at Oxford, you're a professor of Christian ethics, you're Caucasian, and you are a male.

Yeah, well, there's that too. And so that begs the question. It might be that it's easier for people to believe ill of you because they might say, well, Dr. Bigger is only justifying the structure that gave rise to his incredible privilege, his tenured luxury at Oxford. And so he's inclined psychologically to support the colonial enterprise because he's a prime beneficiary of it.

How would you, how do you, how have you responded to that sort of psychological analysis typical of the mobbing types, right? They read the people.

That's a really, really important point. And I thought about this. So my first response is, yes, you could be right. I mean, all of us have social and economic interests, right? And sometimes those interests can determine what we decided to research on and it can shape

the adjustments we come to. So, yes, it's possible that my views and colonialism are indeed shaped by my private interests. Of course, not all interests are illegitimate, but it could be that I'm defending my privilege. But of course, in my view, that goes for everybody, including my critics.

So in principle, yes, could be the case. So as an ethicist, how do you protect yourself against that? I mean, methodologically, I mean, it's easier in the scientific domain, at least in principle, because there are strict methods for separating out personal interest from the facts at hand, even though they're not, you know, 100% reliable, but it's a lot harder when you're investigating history. So I think Jordan and here I speak as a

not simply as a theoretical ethicist, but as one who thinks themselves bound to practice a bit of what he features. I think what needs certain virtues, I mean, I think one needs to have a sense of responsibility to be honest. And that means a sense that one is morally bound to expose oneself to criticism. I'm sure I'm not perfect on that, but I think I do do that. And so in my book,

You tell me if I'm wrong. Let me just decide. In my book, when I'm coming to a judgment about the British Empire, I don't shy away from the really bad bits. And insofar as I identify as British, there's a painful for me to admit, but I do admit them. So I think what one response I have is it is possible to be honest.

And there are certain marks on this person that they are willing to face criticism, they're willing to think about it, and sometimes even willing to concede. And I have to say, compared to my critics, as I've experienced them, I do more of that than they do. No doubt I've got things to learn. Yeah. So we're just going back to... Please go ahead. Yeah. Is it worthy tactic?

of psychologizing people you disagree with and saying, well, he's only doing that or saying that, he would say that wouldn't be because he is white and male and privileged. So one thing I say is, well, it's possible in principle. Let's see if it is the case in practice. The other thing to say is,

It's a dangerous tactic to deploy this psychology of the opposition. Because what it allows you, the psychology I sort of do is to say, well, because he's only doing that because he's white and male and privileged, I don't have to listen to Dan thinking he says.

So I immediately exempt myself from any responsibility to listen to what he says and to respond to it rationally giving reasons. So it kind of immunizes myself against any responsibility actually, to be honest, and open to the criticism implicit in what he says. So I think it's a danger that the psychologizing dismissal of opposition allows you to be dishonest.

That casual kind of moralizing, the only reason you think the way you are is because you're trying to justify yourself. First of all, that cuts both ways. And I think it is worth taking it seriously. You have to examine your own bias in order to think straight. I used to tell my graduate students to triple, double, triple, and quadruple check their statistics and to try to make the results they obtained go away.

because if they were motivated by the necessity to develop their career to publish something that wasn't true, number one, they would warp the whole research enterprise and send other people chasing a red herring, and number two, they could spend the rest of their life investigating something that simply didn't exist.

And then there's the other complicating issue of just being wrong. If you're a sensible thinker and you're a critical thinker, you should subject your own thoughts to the most intense critical analysis possible, knowing that if you put forward second-grade thoughts, you'll act them out and that will cause you no end of grief.

Partly what we're supposed to do in university is teach people to subject their own thoughts to a multiplicity of critical perspective so that there's nothing left but wheat, right? So the chaff disappears. And so when you're writing, you said you take an even-handed approach as much as possible to the catastrophes and benefits of the British colonial enterprise. I mean, how do you, again, how do you, what do you do to try to ensure that you're

surveying is broad a range of the evidence as you possibly can, knowing your own potential bias. Well, there are a number of things.

I teach my students the virtues of being scrupulously just to what someone says in the text and even to be charitable is to say, before you start to criticize what they say, construct it, construe it in the strongest possible form and then dismantle it. So I apply that same thing to myself.

So when I come across material in history that I read about that is negative about the British Empire, I report it in my book. So that there are a number of pages that deal with the 150 years worth of

a foreign involvement in slave trading slavery in the second chapter, I think. And I quote descriptions of what was done to slaves who tried to escape, for example, it's horrific. But it's there on the page, I let the reader see it.

So it's probably a matter of, it's a matter of, not just of critical skills, I mean, this is, so I'd say this, it's a matter of personal virtue, you have to become the kind of person who just does this, one feels obliged to do it. So this is that. In terms of my own work on this topic, so for example, I have read a number of books on controversial issues written by the kind of people who are very hostile to me, I read them.

And on the whole, there are a number of cases in the book, I lay out what they say, and then I take it apart. And most of the time, in my view, it falls apart. But as I said, the reader can see what I'm doing exactly. And if the reader thinks I'm not playing fair, or I'm cheating in some way, or I'm overlooking something, they can see it.

Right, so they can check. So you put enough of the process of the inquiry into the work itself so that people can follow along and double check for themselves whether you're playing a straight game. Absolutely, absolutely. Brandon, you know, you pointed to something that's extremely important. I think in this regard, given your position also as a professor of say Christian ethics, I mean, one of the, I've been investigating the metaphysical presumptions of science.

And there are metaphysical presumptions that have to be accepted before you can start to operate as a scientist. And so, for example, you have to believe that there is a logos or a logic in the objective world. You have to believe that there is an objective world. You have to believe that that logic is apprehensable. You have to believe that apprehending that logic is a moral good, because otherwise why would you bother?

And then you have to believe that truth in relationship to that apprehension is the most important orienting principle. Those are all metaphysical presumptions. I actually think they're metaphysical presumptions that are derived from Christianity itself, which is why science emerged in Europe and not elsewhere. But you said

know that you have to live your life in a manner. If you're going to tell the truth when you write, you have to live your life in a manner that indicates respect for the truth. And how do you justify the claim that that's what you do do in your life? And why should people take that seriously? That's very germane question given your position as a professor of Christian ethics at Oxford, right? I mean, you above all in some ways are required to not only make that case, but to walk.

to walk the walk. That's a deep question, Jordan. So what's my answer to that? I think it's first of all to say, I mean,

We human beings, our lives are taken by themselves, taken in isolation. Our lives are little and meaningless. We come when we go. Unless we plug ourselves into some larger narrative, what on earth does it matter what I do or say?

I'd say that if you think of your life, as I do, as a kind of pilgrimage or an adventure, and the goal is to approximate oneself to what's good and true and beautiful. You might say, God. Then in a sense, my little life in this place

this time, it takes on a larger, deeper, significant. So I think of myself, I mean, I don't know the truth. I know fragments of the truth. But I think of myself, the point of my life,

is to bear witness in the way that I can to what I think is true and worthwhile. I mean, God knows and I mean that literally God knows alone how anything I say or do or achieve will last or what effects it will have. I don't know. But here now I have a limited task and that's simply to bear witness to the truth as I see it. That's one thing I'd say. Okay.

Okay, well, what was it in your life, do you think, that drove you to conclude that alignment with the truth was the appropriate way to conduct yourself? Because there are alternatives, obviously, like manipulation and the pursuit of short-term gratification, the use of deception, for example, to get what you want. Why did you decide what drove you to decide that you were going to at least attempt to align yourself with the truth?

That's a, yeah, it's a really good question. And to me, it's a bit of a mystery. I mean, I wasn't brought up in a Christian household. I was attracted to Christianity. And I think that's something to do with the question you're asking. So, I mean, for a long, I mean, I, you know,

For a long, long time, I find myself fascinated and admiring of individuals who stand up for what they believe to be true and right, even though the whole world turns against them. I'm quite aware that I seem to have become such a person in some respects, but I remember

Age of 678, when the movie King of Kings produced by Cecil D. B. Mill came out in, I think, 16963. My father took me to see it at the local cinema. And I was so moved by the story of Jesus and his crucifixion.

At the age of seven or eight, I came back home, was foot to bed, and I lay there staring at the ceiling, weeping, saying to God, and here I was praying, though no one taught me to pray, take it off Jesus and put it on me.

Oh, it's a blessing to pray for. It takes the age of seven or eight. It's a bit, it's a bit messianics for that age. So I think somehow the idea that one is bound, and you know, you talk about being bound or obliged, it sounds like a burden. Yes, it is, but it's also a fulfillment.

And so shortly after that, this was, I was talking about age six, seven, age 10. I mean, when I was young, I used to steal. And I remember an occasion in, I was at a boarding school, the age of, I don't know, 10, let's say, and I used to steal toy soldiers from some of my school, schoolmates. And one evening I was doing this again. And I suddenly thought to myself,

No, this is not satisfying. I don't want to do this. I don't want this stuff. And I put it back. I never saw it again. Now, again, why did I do that? So in that case, it was a sense of, this is not what I really want. It's not, so, and yes, did I say this to myself? Well, the phenomenon was no.

something said this to me, and I heard it, yeah. So what makes you, so the radical claim, then we'll get to your book, but I want to go into the trustworthiness of its source, let's say, and how that might be established.

The radical postmodern slash neo-Marxist claim is that all claims to truth are essentially masks for an underlying drive to power, sort of a demented Nietzscheanism, and that there's really no escaping your motivation.

And even if you claim to be, as you're claiming now, to be the representative of a higher truth, all that is is a particularly subtle and insidious justification of your underlying motivation. And what makes you believe, do you think, you touched on it with regard to the external quality of the voice of conscience, say, and the emotional impact that this admiration you had in the

aftermath of the movie, you touched on this. What makes you think that there is a truth that can be pursued independent of the subjective striving for dominance and power? So, you quite right, the new Marxists and the postmodernists say that it's all about power. What they mean is they're all about power.

Yes, they do mean that, yes. But the assumption they're making is they're all about power and it's wrong. They're making that because they're criticizing the way

the establishment or the elite behave. And the criticism is based on the assumption that they, the neo-Marxists, know the truth, and they have it right, which is why they want to dismantle that power. But what's missing here is any sense of self-criticism and any kind of self-awareness, because the cynicism is directed completely externally.

But the cynicism with regard to other people implies actually an oblique affirmation that there is truth and there is morality into that we have it. Well, that's very interesting because the other problem with that, so essentially your observation is that

Well, the postmodern types, especially with the more neo-Marxist twist, accuse every system and every other person other than themselves, let's say, of being motivated by nothing but power. Yet they claim that that doesn't apply to themselves, and they implicitly claim that objection to the use of power is moral,

But they absolutely never, as far as I can tell, explain why, which is actually why I was asking you that question. It's like, well, if it's self-evident that power is wrong, and it's self-evident that you stand for something other than the use of power, which is obviously both transcendent, because it can unite people who are united against power, and higher in that it's morally preferable to power, then exactly what the hell is this.

and that postmodernists simultaneously disavow the existence of anything like unifying meta-narrative, and they do that explicitly, even though they seem to have a unifying meta-narrative in their objection to the use of power. But it's all left implicit. It's like an unconscious god, as far as I can tell. It's something like that. And so,

You elaborated out your relationship to transcend the truth in the confines of conscience, you said, with regards to the theft, but also to the feeling of admiration that overcame you when you were six or seven years old when you saw this particular movie. That's an interesting observation to me because I think often that our

moral intuition is grounded in something like admiration, right? And that comes upon us. It's not something we create. You said that happened to you when you were six or seven. You learned that there was something to admire. And you didn't come from a religious background, and yet you became a professor of Christian ethics. So how did that unfold across time?

Just on this business of admiration, and another reason I would give for saying, for justifying why I think of human life properly as being about the acknowledgement and the approximation and the calling towards truth, goodness and beauty is that

it makes those who adopt that position more beautiful. So that they become, those who, and I think even postmodernism might agree with this if they were willing to be thoughtful. When you look upon, as it were, exemplars of the moral position you hold, those who have

risk at all for justice or for the truth.

there's a beauty about them that is fascinating and draws you to them. And that raises the question, I don't suppose cows or slugs rate this way, but it raises the question, why is the cosmos so constructed that we human beings are really moved by people who do such things and sometimes moved to risk all, to risk all, to follow them and do the likewise? That tells us something really important about the cosmos.

Well, it seems to me, and I think your level of analysis is correct. I think that it's a truth that's metaphysical and objective and theological once, that the proper pathway forward, all things considered, is to be found in establishment of a relationship with the truth.

And you might say, well, that's because if you're in accordance with reality, you can dance with reality in a much more effective manner than if you set yourself up in opposition to it.

And then you might say, well, that's such a fundamental truth that we're actually oriented instinctively to apprehend its presence when we see it. And I think the reason that heroes in movies and heroes in literature, I think the idea that the king of kings, that that idea of a king of kings even emerged is it's the hierarchical ordering of that which is most admirable. And what you have on the Christian front is this peculiar

proclamation that what's most admirable is the union of what is highest with service to what is lowest and most and most helpless. You see that I've been looking for example at shepherd imagery in the Old Testament because the shepherd is a common trope for well obviously for Christ but also David is a shepherd and Abel is a shepherd that and a shepherd's a very interesting character because a shepherd back in

More archaic times was a very brave person because the sheep that he guarded were preyed upon by vicious predators. Lions and wolves were very common in the Middle East, and shepherds were often called upon to defend their flock from very vicious predators with very primordial implements. So David, for example, obviously used a slingshot, which he also used to kill giants.

And then the shepherd at the same time has to be the person who, despite that monstrous capacity to kill even wolves and lions, is capable of paying attention and caring for the most vulnerable possible creatures in the shepherd story. It's obviously lambs, but the idea that that's the lost among human beings or infants is an easy move from that position. And you look at David Michelangelo's statue of David and you see this combination of

no masculine capacity to stand firm in the face of terrible opposition and this ability to care for what's vulnerable. And it seems to me that that idea is core to the Christian set of images and stories. And it calls out admiration because it calls to the instinct to emulate that. And that's not a cognitive, it's not exactly a cognitive process. It's way deeper than that.

Yes, yes, yes. John, you asked about how I became a Christian ethicist just briefly to tell you that. I said my first love was always history. I studied history at university in Oxford in the early 70s.

That period of history in this country in Britain was extremely disturbed. My first term in Oxford in October 73, I had to learn to drink my tea without sugar because the

The docks were closed because the dockers were on strike. No sugar was coming to the country. I had to prepare for my first day to be examined by candlelight because the power stations were shut down because the coal miners were on strike. That was when the violence in Northern Ireland was at its height. There was a sense of national crisis. As a young Christian,

I had decided to become a Christian when I was 13 and I was now aged 20 or so, 1920. I was asking myself, what have the theological and moral resources of Christianity got to say to this national crisis?

And actually, looking back, I ended up pursuing a career as a professional ethicist because I wanted to work out my answers to those questions. And so it's a really, I became a Christian ethicist partly because I become a Christian, but also because I was early

Fascinated is too trivial. I was possessed by questions of right and wrong and good and bad, and particularly with regard to the political crisis in Britain of the 1970s. In some ways, Jordan, the book I've just written a colonialism, I feel that of all that I've written, that probably is the book I was born to write.

You used this language of possession, you said, and like you insisted upon that. What do you mean by that, and why did you use that terminology, particularly? Well, again, because it's not true that the experience, the phenomenon was not, I chose to do X. As with the story of when I

finally decided I didn't want to steal anymore. It was a sense that something came to me. That was the experience. Came to me and said, Nigel, you don't really want to do this. And I said, no, I don't really want to do this. So the sense of which, so the word of the talk of possession being possessed is a more accurate description of the experience.

Right, right. Well, that seems to me to be a reflection of the intrinsic logos of being, and it's partly, you see that in science because there are phenomena that scientists study, but those phenomena are also

those phenomena that call to the individual scientists, right? They pursue an interest that makes itself manifest to them in some ways independent of their will. That grip of interest, it manifests itself as the problems that beset you, that will not let you lie in peace. And it manifests itself as the set of opportunities that beckon to you. You know, I don't know if you know this, but the word phenomenon itself

is derived from a Greek root, fainous thai, and it means to shine forth.

And there is this, yeah, that's very interesting. There is this autonomy of problem and interest that's quite the mystery. If something bothers you, you can't just easily shake it off voluntarily. And if an opportunity compels you forward, you can capitalize that and use it as a source of motivation and you could object to it and put it

off to one side, which is a big mistake, but it's very, very difficult to convince yourself that you're interested in something that doesn't call to you. So there is that autonomy, right? And that's related to that idea of possession is that something seizes you and directs you and you can act in concert with it or

or reject it, those seem to be your options. I was looking at the story of Jonah the other day, trying to sort it out. It's such an interesting story because it's very germane to what we're discussing. So Jonah hears a call from God and he's basically called upon to go to a city, Nineveh, and tell the people of Nineveh that they've wandered off the path and that they're going to be in serious trouble if they don't get their act back together.

And Jonah being a wise man, just like most professors, let's say decides there's no damn way he's gonna go to a city and tell everyone there that they're wrong because that's not gonna turn out very well for him. So he decides to get the hell out of there and jumps on a boat, goes in the opposite direction. And then the storms rise around him.

And the sailors conclude that there must be someone on board who's offended the gods or God, and they go to each person and inquire, and Jonah finally admits that God told him to stand up and say what he had to say to the demented citizens of Nineveh, and he decided he was going to escape.

And so the sailors throw them off the boat, at which point the wave sees. And that's pretty, and so it's so interesting psychologically, because what it implies is that if you are called upon to say something, to set things right, even at the social level and you don't, the storms are gonna rise around you.

But that isn't all that happens to Jonah, right? The next thing that happens is that this terrible beast comes up from the abyss and swallows him and pulls him all the way to the bottom of the world. It's like the harrowing of hell in the Christian story. And so the further inference there is that

If something calls to you to speak the truth when things are corrupt and you ignore it, not only will the storms rise around you, but you will end up somewhere so dismal you can hardly possibly imagine it. And I can't help but think about that in light of the rise of totalitarian states in the 20th century, because people in totalitarian states lied to each other and to themselves 100% of the time. And that's why they ended up in hell.

You know, when Jonah repents and decides to go to Nineveh, the whale spits him back up on shore in consequence. And because of that, because of he goes there and tells the truth, the God then decides to not destroy the city. And what that also implies is that if Jonah would have permanently abandoned his ethical responsibility to say what he was called upon to say, that an entire city would have been devastated. And that's a hell of a good lesson for the current times.

Yeah, I mean, I guess my puzzle made, I don't know the answer to it, is why are some people so made?

that they respond to the call. I mean, you caught Jonah, I'm thinking of a passage in the book of the prophet Jeremiah, where the prophet is complaining to God, he's saying, you know, you give me your word and I speak it and everyone hates me and insults me. Bloody hell, I'm not gonna do it anymore, he says, I'm sulking, I'm not doing it anymore. But then he says, but when I do that, this thing burns within me, I cannot hold it in.

So some people like that. But there are others who are not like that, who somehow, when the flag arrives, they distance themselves, they keep themselves safe. I don't know what the secret is. I think part of it is the consequence of a million micro choices.

You know, there's this old idea that the blues singers in the US had that you meet the devil at the crossroads. And the crossroads is obviously a choice point. And what I saw happening in universities is that whenever the faculty were called on to withstand the pressures of the administration, especially as the administration became more and more woke, they retreated. It was a micro-retreat. And so it was a failure to, and the rationale was, well, I don't need to make an issue out of this.

But if you fail to make an issue out of a million micro catastrophes, then it's a macro catastrophe and you're weak. Now, it doesn't completely address the question because you might say,

Well, why do people turn to the right or the left in the initial stages of that decision process? Like in childhood, in principle, when you were faced with your conscience in relationship to stealing those soldiers, you could have continued to steal them, right? You could have upped the ante, you could have doubled down like the pharaoh, let's say, and pursued that pathway. The classic Christian

response to that is that, well, we have free will and whatever that means is our soul is granted the capacity to freely choose between up and down and, you know, barring a better explanation, that's a pretty good one. Otherwise, you end up with notions of predestination and so forth, which I think there's a mystery there that we can't completely

Resolve. I certainly can observe. Yep. No. No. So shall we turn to your book itself? Yes, please. All right. So there's eight chapters in the book and you associated each of the chapters with a question. I thought we would just go through the chapters in the question. So chapter one is, well, let's start with the introduction. You already laid out

the opposition to your work that arose when you started to investigate the ethical pros and cons of colonialism.

And you decided to undertake a moral assessment of the British Empire Project. You lay that out in the introduction. In chapter one, you start with motives, good and bad. And the question you put forward was, was the imperial endeavor driven primarily by greed and the lust to dominate? Well, that's the ultimate in postmodern questions, you might say, allied in that sense we discussed with the Marxists.

Was the imperial ever driven primarily by greed in the lust to dominate? Tell us what you concluded and why. Yes, so this phrase, the lust to dominate is the one that Saint Augustine used in the early 400s to describe the Roman Empire. That's why I used it. And if you take

your cue from Augustine, then that was the kind of essence of Roman Empire. So when I came to think about the history of the British Empire, that was in my mind. And it seemed to me, certainly as far as the British Empire goes, to be completely inadequate to describe it as driven by either the simple lust or dominate, or or greed.

In fact, if you look at the variety of motives that moved Britain's to travel over the world and to take control of his territories,

The reasons are various. And I make a point here that no one woke up in London one day and thought themselves, oh, let's go and conquer the world. It wasn't like that. It was much more ad hoc in response to circumstance. I mean, there may be empires where someone wakes up in Berlin and decides to go and conquer Eastern Europe, but it wasn't always so. And there may be empires that are entirely about lost to dominate, maybe Genghis Khan,

was of that and his Mongols were of that kind. But we'll need to be careful, very careful. I think not to import a kind of one fits all theory and to say, well, this was an empire, so this must have been like that. And a lot of my critics, the reading of historical data is kind of pre-programmed by a theory as to what empire must be. But if you look at the history of the British Empire, motives, I mean,

an early and persistent motive was trade. People, the East India Company went out to India in the 1600s to trade and make money. Other people at the same time went westwards across the Atlantic and pitched up on the coast of North America.

Why did they do that partly because they were there to harass. Spanish shipping bringing gold back to the Americas to Spain why because Spain was the dominant empire in England was a was a product country at the.

at the wrong end of power at that time, ironically, the beginnings of English-British empire in that case were actually anti-imperialist. But yes, then people like Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh are keen to find gold in the Americas, and yes, they abuse the natives. But there you've got trade, which I think is innocent. You've got actually a desire to defend yourself against overwhelming imperial power, which

could be innocent, the lust for gold, the lead you to abuse other people is not so innocent. Later on in the 19th century, one reason the British ended up in West Africa and East Africa, one reason was law being by humanitarians to suppress the trading slaves. So there was a humanitarian reason. So the historical phenomena tell you there are a variety of motives here, some good, some bad.

Okay, so we could perhaps assume as a rule of thumb that the motivations of our ancestors were just as complex as our motivations.

And then we could assume that the tendency to monomonically reduce all motivations to a single motivation is probably more reflective of the refusal to think in complex ways than it is, and what would you say, a manifestation of accuracy and diagnosis. And so you see, I mean, I'm an admirer Freud in many ways, but he was rather monomonical about sex.

and the Marxist types and the Neo-Marxists are absolutely monomaniacal about power. They assume that all human relationships are structured by power, except theirs, as we pointed out before. And then they extend that analysis to the economic and historical domains. And that really does simplify the endeavor, right? It's also interesting from

religious perspective, I would say, because the atheist, neo-Marxist, postmodernists, have elevated power to the status of a God. And I would say, if the spirit of power is your God, that's about as close to an antichrist as you could possibly formulate. And that's very interesting.

That's a very interesting phenomenon as well. Because you might ask, well, in the aftermath of the Nietzschean death of God, what arises to replace that central unifying tendency, let's say, one possibility would be nihilistic disunity, which Nietzsche did describe as a looming danger. But the other is that another kind of

monotheism will arise. And it does seem to me to be very self-serving because once you have decided that power is the only motivation, you never have to think about anything again. You can just interpret everything that happened in terms of oppression and victimization. And if you're smart, you can do that well, you know, but that doesn't mean that it's helpful. Yes, I just stick in this issue of power for a moment, Jordan, because I realize in retrospect,

a major, not the articulate theme running through my book. In fact, all my recent thinking and writing is what I would call a certain realism. So just taking the issue of power, my view is there ain't nothing wrong with power. We all want it. I mean, if we don't have power, we can't do anything.

Right? So let's stop assuming that the power is always bad. The only question is whether we use power well or badly, justly or unjustly.

And the postmodern critics obviously oppose certain kinds of power, but they need to be honest about the fact that they oppose it because they want power for themselves. And the question posed to them is, will you use it well or badly? My experience of them insofar as they've criticized me and what I think is they abuse power very broadly and very casually.

Well, if it's the only motivation, then why not use it? I always think of it as self-justification for use of compulsion. I think we could also distinguish two kinds of power. There's ability and there's use of compulsion. And you pointed out as one of the motivations that drove the British Empire, you

pointed out the desire to trade. Now, a skeptical Marxist would say, well, there's no difference between trade and greed. And so you've undermined your own argument. But if I have something valuable to offer that you can't produce and vice versa and we trade in principle, we're both better off. I mean, that's the classic free market argument. And I don't see anything at all that reeks of compulsion in that endeavor.

I think you have to be damn cynical to think that all production and exchange can be reduced to mutual exploitation.

It doesn't account for productivity, right? There's no productivity there. So it's a foolish theory. I mean, greed is excessive desire for whatever it is. It's a lust. And the question of when, everybody I think wants to flourish. We want to profit in some way. Nothing wrong with that at all. But yes, our desire to flourish and profit can become excessive when it's at other people's expense or when it's unjust.

So let's distinguish the desire to profit or flourish from greed. I would also say we could point to a natural ethos that emerges as a consequence of repeated trade.

we're trading repeatedly in this conversation and hopefully I'm not dominating and hopefully you're not dominating and what would happen if one of us did is that the conversation would degenerate like if we can exchange mutually and reciprocally

then we can play a game that's self-sustaining and that's growing. And the same thing applies on the trade front. So I would say there's a natural limit, intrinsic natural limit to the use of exploitation in economic exchange. Because if you do nothing but exploit your trading partner, the next time you come to trade, you're going to fail.

And in the early, in the early decade centuries of overseas colonial endeavor, the British Europeans were on the weaker foot. Indian merchants, Indian, in fact, the East India Company only got a foothold, a toehold in India, because it was granted them by native Indian rulers. So at that point, the British were the weaker, not the stronger.

Right. So the role of the mercantile impulse, which is an impulse for mutually beneficial trade in the expansion of the empire is radically understated by the Marxist types partly because they don't distinguish trade in any other economic enterprise from greed and power. Yeah. Now, I think, you know, go ahead. Yeah. I mean, let me be honest here and say, for example,

in the use of Native African labor in southern Africa and elsewhere in the British Empire in the early century, there was no doubt. Well, it's a highly probable one needs to examine each case.

that native labour was exploited. That's to say the terms of their employment was unfair, and they were forced to do things they didn't want to do, to which my answer is, well, yes, I'm sure that happened, but it also happened in Britain itself, and it happens no doubt in contemporary India and Nigeria. So the exploitation of labour through unfair terms and conditions wasn't a peculiar colonial sin.

So, okay, so now let's go to chapter two from slavery to anti-slavery. The question you posed there was, should we speak of colonialism and slavery in the same breath as if they were the same thing? Now, one of the weird tensions that emerges for me there

And I've tried to think this through clearly. I'm reading out the moment of multi-volume history of slavery put out, I think, by Cambridge University Press. And my sense, historically, and you can correct me if you think I'm wrong here, is that slavery is a ubiquitous feature of human societies. And the conscious realization that slavery itself is intrinsically wrong, even in the case, let's say, of prisoners of war or debt or debtors,

That notion emerged with great difficulty and it manifested itself most profoundly in the UK, probably in the person of Wilberforce and the Christian Protestant evangelists who made a very strong case that

slavery itself was intrinsically immoral. And the consequence of that was eventually that the British Navy fought for about 175 years on the high seas to make slavery a counterproductive enterprise. And one of the things that sort of terrifies me about the radical leftist enterprise is that

They really risk throwing the baby out with the bath water because whatever it was that it held Wilberforce and then the entire UK to stand against slavery is the only thing we know of in the entire history of the world that actually did stand against slavery with any degree of success. So why do you?

What other cases do you think can be made that colonialism and slavery were not the same thing? And why do you think there is this insistence on the radical left side to deny the very process that actually did free slaves insofar as they've become free in recent times? So, Jordan, I think the identification of colonialism with slavery is similar

to the 1619 project in the United States, which identifies the foundations of the US with fundamentally racist and therefore fundamentally illegitimate. I think what's happened is that the probably through Black Lives Matter, the killing of George Floyd in 2020, Minneapolis, Black Lives Matter movement came across the Atlantic with no change of clothes, landed in Britain. And our equivalent is to say,

contemporary Britain is systemically racist. And the reason we're so similar to racist is that we continue to revere our colonial past, let's say, by having a statute of social roads. And as we all know, colonialism was essentially about slavery, which was based on a racist view of Africans as subhuman. So colonialism,

equal slavery equals racism. And that's the foundations of Britain. And that's why we have to repudiate our colonial past all down Cecil Rhodes.

call down Johnny McDonald in Canada, and somehow, therefore, we liberate ourselves from systemic racism. That's the logic behind the colonialism and slavery mantra. So in this country, those two things are commonly talked about, as if they were the same thing. And my very simple point in that second chapter is to say, wait a moment, as you've just said, Jordan, yes, for 150 years, some British people,

by no means all, we're involved in slave trading and profiting from slavery in the West Indies.

But for 1807 onwards, and then in 1833, first the slave trade, then slavery itself were abolished by the British and for the rest of the Empire's existence for another 150 years roughly, the British were involved in anti-slavery. So you cannot, you cannot identify British colonialism with slavery because for the second half of its life, it was anti-slavery. And yes,

Slavery in one form or another in some forms more humane than others has been around since which of the dawn of time practiced on every continent by black and brown and red-skinned and yellow-skinned people as well as white-skinned people. The Comanche nation in the southwest of the US ran what one historian has called a vast slave economy in the 1700s

the Arabs were involved in slavery, Africans were selling African slaves to the Romans and the Arabs before they ever sold to Europeans. So we may be dismayed at the fact that so many Europeans and British people

up until the late 1700s accepted this institution and the fact of slave trading. But we have to put it in context. Everyone did it, including slaves who escaped from the plantations in Jamaica into the forest of interior. Some of them kept slaves of their own, so common was the practice. So yes, what happened in the late 1700s was that for the first time in

In history, some nations, not just Britain, also Denmark and France, came to the view that only other people as your property, without them having any rights, was morally abhorrent. And for the first time in history, these nations, eventually led by Britain, abolished the slave trade and slavery, and then Britain used its imperial power, its power,

for humanitarian purposes to abolish slavery from Brazil across the Atlantic, across Africa, India, to Malaysia. So power can be a good thing. And in that case, it was used for humanitarian purposes. The irony here is, Jordan, as you suggested just before I started speaking, the irony here is in that case,

the empire and those humanitarians who were lobbying for the imperial power to be used as a press slavery, they were the progressive people of their days. Well, it also seems to me, and you're in a great position to comment on this,

So first of all, we have to accept to some degree that the willingness to use power and compulsion and to keep slaves is relatively ubiquitous across the entire human family, let's say, and that opposition to that emerges with difficulty and rarely.

And then you have to ask yourself, what are the preconditions for that kind of opposition? And certainly the case with Wilberforce, as far as I can tell, that he was driven by the conviction that all men and women are made in the image of God, and that it was a violation of a transcendent ideal, that slavery in and of itself was the violation of a transcendent ideal.

And that is something that's deeply rooted in the Christian tradition. And deeper than that, I mean, there's certainly the dawning of objection to the notion of slavery and tyranny in the book of Exodus. That's much older than Christianity. But it's still an idea that emerged with difficulty. And I

I have tried to think my way around this, right? Because I don't like to multiply unnecessary metaphysical presumptions. But I can't see at all that opposition to slavery would have emerged the way it did in Britain if it wouldn't have been able to draw on a well of metaphysical and religious presupposition that was predicated on the idea that each person has a soul and that that soul in some manner has a divine value.

Yeah, yeah. So you're quite right. The main impulse for the abolition movement was Christian, evangelical Christian. And so John Wesley in 70, 74 published a treatise called Upon Thoughts of Slavery. And on the front page of the treatise is a quotation from the book of Genesis where is it

Cain says something like, am I my brother's keeper? God's answer being yes, yes, you are. And the implication being that all human beings, regardless of race and cultural development, are equally children of the one God. And that was clearly the main conviction that drove even your Christian non-conformist Christians initially to follow me. And I hadn't.

I didn't know about that comment by Wesley, so that ties the story of Cain and Abel in with the opening chapters of the earlier parts of Genesis, the old verses of the earlier part of Genesis. So you have the proposition that human beings are made in the image of God, and you have the later proposition in the Cain and Abel story, that that means that you have a divine obligation to act in relationship to others with that

divine value in mind. That's right. And so now we're getting on to chapter three on race here at Jordan. So this Christian conviction of the fundamental basic equality of all human beings, regardless of race, that persists throughout the British Empire. There was in the second half of the 1800s, the development of a contrary

view which you might call a scientific or biological racism which holds that you have a hierarchy of races and the white races are naturally biologically superior to non-white races. So you have a kind of permanent fixed heart-racial hierarchy. But this notion of some people's being naturally inferior

with the Christian notion, but never displaced it. So for example, I was reading, and I quote this in my book, an account of debates in the Parliament of Canada in the 1880s. And it's reported by the historian that every time someone would stand up and say that the Native Americans are naturally inferior, others would stand up and other MPs would stand up and say, no, that's not British, that is not Christian. Yeah.

Yeah, well that's an interesting, there's a lot of issues there that have great interest. One is that the white supremacist movement in the late 1800s was grounded in the quasi-scientific tradition and not in the Christian tradition, so that's pretty interesting for those who think that

science by necessity will offer a morally superior view to, say, a mythologically predicated metaphysics. And the eugenicist movement was a scientific movement as well. And it was predicated on a misapprehension of Darwinian presumptions and a misuse of the notion of survival of the fittest, fittest being equated with, let's say, most successful and dominant right now. And those concepts are by no means equal.

So a scientist would object, well, they were bad scientists, and there's some truth in that, but it's still interesting that the dominant form of explicit racism emerged out of the confines of the scientific community and not within the confines of the religious community.

And so you're the question that you posed in chapter three, which we just discussed was, was the British Empire essentially racist? One of the things that struck me about Wilberforce and Wesley, this is particularly true in relationship to India, is that even though by the time they were operating and agitating against slavery, there were extremely potent economic reasons to keep

India under the thumb of Britain, so to speak, there was still a tremendous amount of impetus on the moral side to translate the British Empire into something like self-government for the inhabitants of India as rapidly as possible. And that's, of course, a radical improvement over the situation that obtained before the British occupied India because it wasn't like it was a

equality, a paradise of equality of opportunity prior to the emergence of British power. That's right. I mean, as I am franken the book, yes, the British Empire did contain all sorts of racial prejudice. But my point is it didn't only contain that, it also contained, as we've just discussed, this major movement for the abolition of slavery and

later on in the 1800s, a movement of concern for the plight of native peoples who were suffering under the sudden impact of modernity, based on a racial egalitarian view. And also, yes, sometimes you get Britons who are

dismissive and contemptuous of native cultures. But on the other hand, in India, for example, you have Britons who are fascinated by ancient Sanskrit Hindu culture, who unlike Indians who are allowing the ancient monuments to disintegrate, preserve the monuments. And then you get this very

Just in case you think that British Imperialists were constantly imposing their unwanted culture on native peoples who have this incident in 1829, I think, when I think really three, maybe, when the East India Company wants to invest in a

in building a Hindu college devoted to ancient indigenous Sanskrit learning. And you have a progressive Indian social reformer, Raja Ramohan Rai, who writes to the Governor General and says, look, Sanskrit learning has been knighted. What Indians need is exposure to European science in which Europe has become preeminent.

And just think of that for a moment. In this case, the Brits want to support Indigenous learning.

And the Indian says, no, we need the new stuff, the European stuff. So, yes, there was racism, but there was also respect for and fascination for and admiration for native cultures. Yeah, well, the issue, the question that you posed was it essentially racist. Now, if it's racist by

by error and by corruption. That's very different than, say, as you pointed out, the 1619 project, which is making the case that the essential motivation was both racist and slave-owning, let's say, predicated on this need to dominate and oppress. And there's a big difference between saying that things might degenerate in that direction even frequently and saying, no, that was all it was. That's that essential monomania, again, that we were talking about.

Yeah. And so, see, and another, I would say, historical fact that mitigates against the essentially racist accusation is the persistence of the Commonwealth after the empire

abandons its direct political control. I mean, you have to ask yourself, it's not as if the Commonwealth is as tight or effective as it might be, but as far as a loose collection of nations on the international front goes, the Commonwealth is pretty damn voluntary in its structure and also an aggregation of the countries that function better on average than almost all countries in the world.

and that includes India, interestingly enough, which is a very, very complicated country and hard to get all moving in a productive direction simultaneously.

the liberal vision of an empire that would, as it were, relax into independent states. I mean, the British learnt their lesson from the American War of Independence in the 1770s and 80s, and in my book I quote,

Three Scotsmen, all of whom ended up governing cities in India, Madras, Calcutta, Bombay in the 1820s, and every one of them can be found writing to each other or saying to their subordinates, look, we aren't going to be here forever. We British can't rule here forever. All we can hope to do

is to help build decent government, leave with grace, and carry, we hope, the goodwill of Indians. And then from 1867 onwards, as you as a Canadian will know, when Canada became a Dominion, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, all become increasingly independent, and by 1930 they're virtually independent states.

And India is put on the same track after the First World War. So yes, some Britons wanted to cling on to imperial power too long. But there was also a kind of liberal vision whereby the empire would relax into what was being talked about as a Commonwealth of Nations as early as 1916.

Yeah, well, it's very interesting to speculate on the motives for that emergence too. I mean, you don't want to be naive when you look at the historical record, but it seems to me to be undeniable that especially again, in the impulse that gave rise to people like Wesley and Wilberforce, there was this notion of the universal dignity of mankind and the idea that if we could all cooperate voluntarily towards the highest possible ends, that that would be much preferable to any state of

Preferable in maintenance and productivity and ethical desirability to any state that might be imposed by force.

Yeah, so I think there was a positive liberal conviction plus a kind of wise political recognition that Britain didn't have the power to impose itself. It lost the war against the Americans in the 70s and 70s and it recognized it didn't have the power to make colonies do exactly what it wanted. So it had to negotiate it.

Right. Well, so the cynical view would be, well, because Britain couldn't exercise power, it settled for the second best choice. But that's pretty damn cynical because there are other ways of being foul and corrupt that don't involve necessarily the use of direct power. And it is quite interesting that India, for example, still maintains very positive relationships with the UK.

Yeah, it does. And I myself think that since power is a fact of life, and the other question is whether you use it badly or well, I think those who recognize the limits of their power are wise, and many people don't. Chapter four, Land Settlers and Conquest. How far was the empire endeavor based on the conquest of land?

So in North America and in Australia, after some extent in Africa, yes, there was conquest. As an ethicist, as a theorist about just war, that doesn't settle the matter ethically because I have to know what were the reasons for the conquest. But my reading of what happened in North America was that the English

colonists in the 1600s were pretty brutal and pretty unscrupulous in taking lands from native peoples. But there was a moral revolution as we talked about to the end of the 1700s. And in Australia, I think certainly colonial governors and officials were, they tried very hard

to prevent settlers from seizing lands unjustly from natives. And in the 1800s, the principle was that you don't seize territory, you negotiate and you make treaties. And in the 1800s, that's what happened in Canada. So when people talk about

You know, the British Empire is one thing. And when people say, well, it was essentially racist or essentially exploitative or essentially about conquest, I have to say, well, no, it was all sorts of things. And you've got, you've got, you do have the unjustities, you're of territory. But in the case of India, for example, the British never settled there in large numbers. In 1900, when there were about 300 million Indians, there were only about 164,000 Britons.

So there wasn't, there were conquests in India, but again, one has to ask, well, was the user force in this case justified? Sometimes conquests are justified. I mean, the Allies conquered Nazi Germany in 1945. Most of us would say that was justified. So conquests are not necessarily wrong. But there's no doubt that some land was taken unjustly from natives. But let's put this in context again.

The mass movement of people and the trespasses on other people's territory had been a fact of life throughout history. Within the North American continent, Indian peoples were in the business of displacing other Indian peoples.

So the Iroquois, I think in the 1600s, expanded. They had their own, if you like, their own empire that was expanding. The Zulu in the 1826th Africa, they expanded and pushed other African peoples off territory. And not justifying that, I'm not saying it was good. And when the Europeans did it with the British did it, I'm not saying it was good. But it happened a lot because unlike the world we inhabit today, they didn't have stable states with fixed boundaries.

things were much more fluid and uncertain. But it's not the case that the British Empire was built entirely on conquest or entirely on the unjust Caesar of land. It depends on the case. In some cases in Canada, for example, the session of land by native Canadians was agreed by treaty.

And partly because, inadvertently, Europeans have brought disease to North America. Native peoples had died out in droves, and land that had been occupied was then vacant. And it suited Native Canadians to see this land that they had no use for. It depends on the case.

Number five is cultural assimilation in genocide. How did the British Empire involve genocide? I mean, this is a hot issue in Canada because our own prime minister has basically defined our country and our culture as intrinsically genocidal. And that's an accusation that's causing no end of trouble, but nowhere near as much trouble as it's going to cause. And so it's a crucial issue. And so what did you conclude on that front?

So everything depends on how we define genocide, Jordan. I think, first of all, following what the international law says about genocide, genocide has to be intentional, right? So if you're talking about the mass annihilation of real people, my understanding is that

no genocide occurred with the British Empire, not even in Tasmania, and I'm not alone in thinking that there are Australian historians who also think the use of the word genocide to discuss, to describe the annihilation of the virtual annihilation of Tasmanian aborigines was genocide that's not appropriate. As for Canada... Why not in Tasmania? If that's the most crucial case, that would obviously be a reasonable place to focus. So why is that inappropriate in the case of Tasmania?

Because it's quite clear that the colonial government sought to protect Aborigines. There was no intention of the part of the colonial government to exterminate Aborigines, and the evidence I've read says that even among settlers, yes, there were some who were so hostile to natives, they wanted to exterminate them, but that was not a majority opinion.

So to describe what happened, the reason, to describe the reason their homogeneous were virtually annihilated, not completely, because of an intentional campaign to exterminate them is just not true. Many of them, of course, died because of disease and because of displacement. But it was not an intentional campaign of extermination. In Canada- Predicated on explicit state policy.

No, no, not at all. And the state did its best to prevent the abuse of natives by settlers. The problem was, as was often the case with colonial government, it was too weak, not too strong. It didn't have the power, the manpower, other resources to stop what was going on in the frontier, which was wild and lawless.

Right, well, we should point out, as in the case of slavery, that explaining ethnocentrism isn't actually a problem. The problem is explaining any resistance to ethnocentrism. That's the miracle. I mean, human beings have very distinct in-group propensities, and that seems to characterize us at every level of social organization. And so the probability that when one group meets another, there's going to be a certain degree of

dehumanization of the other to use the leftist tropes, that's almost certain. But there is that countervailing position that we've been elaborating, which extends a hand of welcome and an invitation to trade to people who aren't part of our particular ethnic group. And that's a non-trivial modifying force to the expression of that desire to dominate and destroy.

Absolutely. And just to expand a bit on that, yes, the human propensity to identify one group.

against another and to feel superior to the other, whether it's football clubs or nations or races or churches or whatever have you, that's a universal human propensity. We all like to do it because it makes us feel bigger and better. But when you're thinking about what happened when Europeans encountered natives and

Aboriginals in Australia or Native Americans or Canadians in North America used to do two things in mind. First of all, the cultural gap was vast. Europe at that time was at the pinpoint of modernity in terms of technology and science and weaponry and whatever, and that they met people who in terms of cultural development,

that will much less developed. And so the cultural gap was just vast. And these people don't understand each other. And you have weak government authority. So there's not much to control your encounter.

And so the sense of threat was high, and where people feel insecure, they don't understand each other, they don't have the same customs. Conflict is almost inevitable, and it's uncontrolled. And that was tragic. So when you're thinking about this encounter between different ethnic groups, then the inclination to be

Dismissive and hostile to another group is intensified because of those conditions.

Right. Yes. Well, and I would also say too, we don't want to underestimate the degree to which many of the earliest adventurers on the colonial frontier were narrative wells and psychopaths who left their own country because no one could tolerate them. And so there was a certain heightened percentage of the worst who left first because no one could stand them where they came from. And they had the opportunity to let their sadistic motivations run free on the frontier.

So when we talk about colonialism and I try to avoid the ism because it implies, again, something that was unitary. We're talking about imperial government, London, colonial government in Ottawa and missionaries and traders and adventurers. We're talking about all the different people with different attitudes. And you're right. The story in North America and

Africa was sometimes of independent private adventurers. Part of the reason for imposing a colonial government is to try and control the encounter between Europeans and natives in the hope that you might be able to protect natives. Right. Well, number seven,

Or number six was free trade investment exploitation. Was it the empire driven fundamentally by the mode of economic exploitation? I think we've covered that. So let's move to number seven, government legitimacy and nationalism, chapter seven, since colonial government was not democratic, did that make it illegitimate? So what I say about that, Jordan is, I mean, I think any good government has to be government for the people.

And any government that wants to serve the people's interests needs to need to understand what it is the people need and it needs to be able to hear from the people so that it forms policy that serve the people's interests. So there needs to be communication between the bottom and the top.

And democracy is one way of doing that, and it's one way of holding executive government to account, but it's not the only way. And I just think it is quite implausible to suppose that sufficient political justice only visited the earth with the birth of the American Republic in the late 1700s, early 1800s.

So the fact that a government isn't democratic, to my mind, doesn't make it illegitimate. And mass democracy was only developing in the Western world in the 1800s and in Europe, the late 1800s. Britain didn't give the vote equal to men and women

until 1928. So if the empire wasn't democratic, it was partly because Britain was only becoming democratic. And the last thing I'd say about that is that native people sometimes recognize that even the government that isn't democratic is good enough. So in the 1950s and 60s, no one knows how many, but there were several million Chinese who fled the Chinese mainland because it was then in a state of civil war or anarchy.

Where did they flee? They fled into the British colony of Hong Kong. They did it voluntarily. Not because Hong Kong was democratic, but because at least there was the rule of law and the sufficient stability to build a decent life. So your case essentially is, I think, is that

Even if there is a hierarchy of legitimate government with highly functional democratic states being at the pinnacle, that doesn't mean there's no differentiation whatsoever between states that haven't reached that level of development for one reason or another. Exactly.

well-examified in the case of Hong Kong. And so it's not obvious to me at all that Hong Kong was well-served by being returned to the Chinese Communists, for example. I mean, I know that was a transition away from democracy, but people had been voting with their feet long before that.

On the inside of the cover of my book, I insisted there be a photograph of young Chinese student protesters in Hong Kong with a placard saying, Hong Kong is British. Just to make that point. Right, right, right. Right. Well, so what do you think it is that lends a government legitimacy if it can be legitimate to some degree outside of the formal structures of the kind of democracy we more or less take for granted now?

It's because it provides just government and just government means that the genuine interests of the people are well served. And the thing about democracy, we all know government can go bad. And democracy, liberal democracy is a way of constraining that.

It doesn't remove the possibility. Even democratic government can go bad. But sometimes without the democratic constraints, non-democratic governments can rule justly. That's why people, if that weren't the case, Chinese people would not have entered Hong Kong.

Right, right. Well, we could go back to our early discussion and presume that non-democratic governments that are still predicated on the idea that there's something intrinsically valuable about each individual and that each individual is responsible for the safekeeping and safeguarding of other individuals, that's not a bad step in the legitimate government direction.

Absolutely. I did just to go back to your biblical allusions earlier, Jordan. Of course, in the Hebrew Scriptures, the Old Testament, a common metaphor for the king is shepherd. So even back there, there's a notion that a king, a good king, is a shepherd of his people. And sometimes, sometimes it happened.

And he's also subordinate to a higher authority. And you even saw that among the Mesopotamians. So this is not in the Judeo-Christian line of thinking, but the Mesopotamians regarded their emperor

If he was exercising his sovereignty properly, he was an avatar of Marduk, and Marduk had eyes around his head so he could see in all directions, and he could speak truthfully and magically. And so the Mesopotamians had already figured out that there was a principle of legitimate sovereignty, and that had something to do with the ability to pay attention to everything and to speak honestly. Yeah, so this goes back to our earlier discussion, Jordan, because yes, I'm a good ruler.

is one who recognizes that he is subject to the requirements of goodness, truth and beauty. And human consciousness aren't always sensitive, but sometimes I rule as conscience is sensitive. And that's why, one reason why I remain a supporter of the monarchy in Britain, because as we saw at the coronation ceremony a few days ago, the symbol of the head of state,

gets on his knees to receive authority from above, which is given to him. And I think that's a fantastic, really important political symbol. Right. Well, and it's comprehensible too, when you put it in terms of something like an aggregation of virtues, say, well,

even if you're not explicitly religious in the classic monotheistic sense, you could say, well, a good ruler should be subordinate to the principles of truth and beauty and justice and courage and the panoply of more or less universally recognized virtues and that those are, in some sense, rulers above him or her. Yes. Yes.

Chapter eight, justified force and pervasive violence was the empire essentially violent and was its violence pervasively racist and terroristic. Okay, first thing to say is all states.

depend upon the threat of the use of violence. Because states are in the business of suppressing unjust behavior, whether within or threats from without. And unfortunately in the world we have, some people do abuse others and sometimes they have to be forced to stop and therefore force and sometimes violent force has to be used. So let's recognize that is true of all states. Next thing to do is to recognize that

As I said, in the past, whether in Britain or in Britain's colonies, governments in 1700s and 1800s were compared to the states we have now, very weak, limited resources. And we've got a weak state, the threat of violence erupting and the whole system disintegrating as high, and therefore, in greater insecurity,

the greater use of violent forces morally permissible. The only reason that we in Canada or the States or in the West, in Europe,

And we can afford to be very restrictive in the use of force within our own territories. The only reason we can afford that is because we're very strong states and where we don't have a lot of violence in the streets. But in the past, that wasn't so. So there's that. And then the third thing to say is whether violence is justified or not depends on the circumstances of the case. And I give some instances in that chapter of imperial violence that I think was quite unjustified.

But then I say the British Empire was at its most violent between 1939 and 1945 during the Second World War.

when, as Canadians and Australians and Indians and Africans well know, the British resistance to Nazi Germany was an imperial effort. And between May 1940 and June 1941, May 1940, France fell June 41, the Germans unwisely invaded Russia. In that period, the British Empire, with a sole reception of Greece, offered the only military resistance to the massively murderous racist regime in Berlin.

So, yes, the empire was often violent. Sometimes, and in that latter case, its violence was well justified. Well, let's wrap up with the conclusion and the epilogue. One of the things that I've noticed is that this insistence that our ancestors, let's say, were motivated by nothing but oppression and power,

is and is perhaps designed to be something that's profoundly demoralizing to modern people. And I think that's especially true of young men, because the implication is that their ambitions

are nothing but the manifestation of a sort of narrowly self-centered greed, that they're feeding nothing but patriarchal oppression at every level of social organization from marriage up to the state itself, and that even if they manage to

And not only are there ambitions, manifestations of that patriarchal oppression, say it's also part of a planetary, destructive planetary force. And that seems to me to be profoundly demoralizing. If we lose respect for our ancestors, like a balanced respect, I think we simultaneously lose respect for our institutions and for ourselves. And I really think that's happening in a widespread manner at the moment. And that seems to me to be nothing but bad.

And so you wrote your epilogue and your conclusion. What did you conclude overall in terms of what you would hope for and recommend for the future? So just in the conclusion, I craft an overall judgment about the British Empire. And I say, we end up with

And I list them a list of evils and a list of goods. There's no way we can say that one outweighed the other. You can't do it that way. I mean, how many emancipated slaves are worth? How many people killed at Emirates of 19? You can't do it that way. What you can do, and I see to demonstrate that, is to say that the Empire was not essentially

racist or exploitative or given to unjustified violence and in vision you've got these growing humanitarian strands in the 1800s and the liberal political strand whereby the empire relaxes into independent states and then when does the empire exhaust itself during the Second World War fighting Nazism which has to say something good about what it had to become. So that's how I, what's what I can do about the empire. But to your question about

the present relevance of all this. And this is why I wrote the book. It wasn't just for historical reasons at all. It was because, you know, I noticed that in current debate in the English speaking world, the book is as entirely by the

postmodernist or anti-colonial critics, entirely on European British empires. The fact that Arabs and Africans and Native Americans did empire or the Chinese or the Japanese doesn't matter. It's all about the white empires. Why is that? And I read that as being because this is an assault on the record and the self-confidence of the West.

because if it's true that our countries, Canada, Britain, Australia, New Zealand, if our countries were built on racism and exploitation, then that surely undermines our confidence in the institutions that we've created. And as a recipe for, and ourselves, and as a recipe for, as it were, year zero revolution, which generally speaks of humanity very well. So that's why...

Okay, so I see two things driving that, and I'd really like your comments on this, and then maybe we could turn finally to the issue of critical reviews of your book. So the first thing I see in that enterprise is an attempt to revivify the Marxist doctrine of oppression and victim, is that if you can point to the West as fundamentally exploitative, and the rest of the world say as fundamentally victimized,

you breathe new life into the corpse of Marx and can maintain that monomaniacal fixation on power as the fundamental motivating, the fundamental motivator of humanity. But I see something deeper going on there too, you know, and this is a trickier problem. You know, I've been writing about the story of Cain and Abel and

Cain and Abel are of course the first two real human beings in history, because Adam and Eve were made by God, and they locked themselves in a fratricidal relationship that degenerates into chaos as the story progresses. And the fundamental story is envy and revenge, the spirit of bitterness, envy and revenge against the spirit that prevails as a consequence of making proper sacrifices.

And I see that battle, and I'm not alone in this. I mean, people who analyze mythological stories have noted the trope of the hostile brothers as a universal trope for decades. But it is something like the spirit of envy against the spirit of productive generosity. And I see the Marxist enterprise itself as a manifestation of that more fundamental resentment and envy. And this as a continuation of an ideological or religious battle that's been going on

essentially, as long as there's been human beings. It's the attempt by those who refuse to produce and refuse to share, to tear down and destroy the accomplishments of those who have done it to some degree, even however badly. And so I'd like your reflections on those suppositions, if you wouldn't mind. Yeah. So then in that little guy,

Having decided that the story that has been put about about colonialism is historically untrue and quite unfair. I then asked myself, well, why are people going beyond the evidence and the truth here? So the evidence says the structure was mixed. They say it was all essentially racist, et cetera. What propels these people to go beyond

what reason and evidence and the truth permit. And I end up thinking of it maybe as you do too, it's a kind of spiritual thing. One speculation is we all like to big up our little lives by

making ourselves into the knights in China and we like to put down other people. It's a very human thing. And so there's a bit of kind of self-idegrad diasement here where I get to be the social justice warrior. And there's the wicked evil bigger and there's the wicked evil Peterson and we're going to smash them. Feels great, doesn't it? So there's a bit of that.

going on, I think. I think it's also perhaps a kind of degenerate Christianity in that according to Christianity, it's always right to confess our sins. And the self-righteous, ironically, the saint is one who knows just how sinful he really is.

Right. But he doesn't know how sinful others are. That's the thing. Well, it's really, I do think it is an attempt to acquire, and this isn't particularly original observation, but it's an attempt to acquire unearned moral virtue. And it's a demented messianism and it's unearned moral virtue because the confession is on behalf of

the group and not the individual. It's like, here's how we were wrong. And most of those we wasn't me. That was my ancestors. And I'm clearly morally superior to them. And I've done all the necessary work of repentance and transformation. It's like, yeah, I don't think so. That's a lot more difficult than you might think. And I think it's the desire to avoid that responsibility and to adopt the guise of the cloak of messianism without any of the work that's driving this in one of the most fundamental ways.

Yes, and then some of these people, I mean, they're often white, they're often highly privileged and they presume to speak on behalf of the oppressed of the world. And when some members of the oppressed of the world with non-white skins stand up and say, we don't agree with you. In fact, I've had

Soon after I got into trouble in 2017, I got an email from an ethnic Indian, Britain, whom I've met 10 years before. He was a medic, and he said to me, Nigel, I don't know if you know, but my grandfather was among those in the Jullian Wallerbug in Amrits, or in 1919, when General Dyer opened fire for 60-15 minutes and shot 350 unarmed Indians. My grandfather was among them.

But he said, nevertheless, I think the British Empire contained good as well as bad. So there was one of the oppressed speaking to me and saying on your side, but my critics, they think they stand for the oppressed. There's an odd ironic patronizing, condescending quality to those they think they represent.

It's also a bit much for me. It's like one of the things I did notice among the radicals say at Ivy League institutions in the United States is

Not only did they want all the privilege of being privileged, which they certainly have merely as a consequence of being in an Ivy League institution, but they want all the privilege and moral glory of being oppressed at the same time. And there's a kind of grasping narcissism in that that's really overwhelming. It's like, I see, I see what you want. You want everything that goes along with wealth and power. And you want to have all the virtue, whatever that might be, of being associated with

victimized and oppressed. That's too much. That's too much. That's too much. That's agreed that is bottomless in its narcissistic extent. And so I can't help but see that. The discourse.

I agree. So you end up with some people claiming to have indigenous heritage that it's discovered they don't have at all. Because I take the attraction of identifying yourself as a victim. It's certainly political now because it will gain you political points in terms of your career, in terms of your status.

So one can turn the post-modernist cynicism back on these post-modernists and say, well, actually, what are your interests here? Are they legitimate?

So now, here you are. You're not being mobbed horribly as we speak. You published this contentious book a few weeks ago. Has the mob come for you in any profound and unsettling way? And that's the first question. And the second question is, how has your book been received critically? OK, let's take those two questions in turn. So has the mob come for me?

Yes, in so far as some of the reviews I've received have been extremely hostile and I confess I took a while to read them because it was always a bit emotionally taxing to read what some people say.

particularly since it's almost invariably unfair and distorted. So the very hostile reviews, one of them

runs to 15,000 word diatribe that the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History will publish. Glad to say that I was invited to write a response and after good in my lines and mastering my courage, I read through this stuff and I've written a 14,500 word response and with the exception of three minor points, I don't think it scores. So in this case and in all the others,

Once I work my way through the hostile responses, I emerge feeling stronger. Right, right. So that's a good doctrine for life, actually, if you're trying to live a great life is that if you do confront those accusations, which is very unsettling and requires a lot of soul searching to the degree that they're unjust and mere accusation, then you can what when you say you can fortify yourself in your convictions.

Yeah, I mean, to be quite honest, I have learnt some things. If I were to write the book again, I would change some things, but not big things. I am open to the possibility that I'm completely daft and that I'm making a huge fool of myself. But as my consistent experience over the last

five, six years since 2017 is once I face the opposition and look at it and scrutinize it, I actually think, no, I'm right. As for the exception of the book, generally, tremendous. It was published in the UK in

2nd February, it went into the Sunday Times newspaper non-fiction Top 10 bestseller list for two weeks. I was told a week or so ago that in the first three months of its publication here, it had sold just under

24,000 hardback copies, and it was published in Canada and the US only last week, so we get to see what it does there. The good news, Jordan, is from my point of view, in spite of my critics and in spite of attempts to cancel the book that my original publisher made,

There is evidently a large public appetite for a reasonable, even-handed, thoughtful consideration of this contentious issue. Well, that's heartening, I would say, that there is an audience for it and that the audience is large and that this discussion can proceed and that you can manage it and still, well,

and still have your life. You can say these things, well, it is very heartening, that that's still a possibility, a real possibility to have it published and to have it widely appreciated, at least, or widely criticized for that matter, at least available. Now, are you still teaching full-time at Oxford?

I'm 67 years old, excuse me, I'm 68 now, but I retired at 67, which was one year earlier than I have to, because in Oxford we still have a mandatory retirement age. But I chose, I'd always planned to retire at 67. So I finished being a full-time professor in

in the September last year. But I did that not because I planned to set in the beach and drink cocktails all day because there are other things I want to do like this, like writing for the press. And so I wanted to be free to focus on what I really want to do. And I'm doing it. And so what's your next project?

Right now, I just finished two books back to back. I did a book on what's wrong with rights in 2020 and then this book came out and I'm going to be busy, I think, doing this kind of thing, having these kind of conversations on colonialism, I think, through to the autumn of this year.

I'm not set upon writing another book at this point. I may write something on what I've experienced in the last five years in terms of free speech and the way in which communities react to people like me reflect on the silence of colleagues and the way in which institutions behave, something along those lines. I haven't decided yet.

All right, everyone. Well, we have been talking today with Professor Nigel Bigger, Professor of Christian Ethics, about his new book, Colonialism of Moral Reckoning, which hit the bestseller list in the UK and is now widely available in other English-speaking markets. And I presume we'll be translated quite widely as the months progress. Thank you, everyone.

who's watching and listening for attending to this dialogue and to the Daily Wear Plus people for facilitating the conversation.

adding their level of technical expertise to the film crew here. I'm in Cyprus today to the film crew here in Cyprus. Thank you very much for making this happen. Dr. Bigger, it was good to talk to you again. And good luck with the continued pursuit of your endeavors. And congratulations on the publication and success of the book. And no doubt will be in further contact, at least I hope so. And it was very good talking with you today. Yeah, it'd be great talking to you, Jordan. And thanks for the opportunity.

And now as you know, if you're listening, I'm going to talk to Dr. Bigger, Professor Bigger for another half an hour on the Daily Wire Plus platform. And we'll discuss some of the elements of his career and his biography. And so if you're interested in that, and I think you probably should be, if you found this conversation useful, consider heading over to the Daily Wire Plus platform and picking up that additional discussion. See you all later.

Hello, everyone. I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on dailywireplus.com.