Hello everyone,

This is the live streaming channel of the Blackheath Philosophy Forum, a community group based in the Upper Blue Mountains, New South Wales, Australia that for some years has been arranging public discussion forums on philosophical topics. 

Because of the virus we have moved our events from our usual windy municipal hall to the web. My name is Peter Baldwin, and I chair the forum.

I thought we could take advantage of a three-week gap in our originally scheduled program to have a discussion about the general theme we chose for this year’s series of talks, which is:

A new Dark Age? Emerging threats to free speech and the liberal order

I will be joined in this discussion by John Stephenson, a local author and stalwart of the Blackheath Philosophy Forum, indeed a former chairman.

Here is the plan for today: I will speak for roughly twenty five minutes. John will then respond, raising whatever issues he sees fit, which we will discuss for a further period. You can give us your thoughts by posting in the chat window as this is going on.

We will then take a short break to make a cup of tea, or a whisky on the rocks, or whatever suits your fancy, then resume to respond to the chat entries. 

As I have been promising for some time, there will be a facility on our website to continue the discussions in detail. Expect an email about that next week – sign up to our email list at blackheathphilosophy.org

So here is my opening spiel.

You might be wondering what we are getting at here. A new Dark Age? That is surely exaggerated, hyperbolic, perhaps absurdly so, you might think.

I should stress at the outset that I am not actually a prophet of doom – the bad scenarios that I worry about are probably avoidable, but we need to be able to have honest discussions about them and take timely action.

A number of centres have recently been set up around the world to study what is termed ‘existential risks’ to humanity - one of our earlier speakers, Professor Huw Price, actually heads one based at Cambridge University. 

Existential threats include things like lethal pandemics – maybe much worse than the present one – global wars, out of control nanotechnologies, meteor strikes – I won’t list them all. 

According to the British Astronomer Royal, Sir Martin Rees, the most discussed one, climate change, could be the least of our worries. Now there’s a cheerful thought

But the one I will focus on today concerns the possible loss of the rights and freedoms – especially freedom of speech – that people living in post-Enlightenment Western societies like ours tend to take for granted, have become dangerously complacent about, and in some circles are actually starting to despise.

I think we are like the proverbial boiling frog, not noticing how these freedoms are being steadily eroded, at a historical juncture when powerful international forces with very different value systems are encroaching. 

At this point I will make a short digression to talk about the original Dark Age, but more specifically about an odd shift in the scholarly consensus about its nature.

The terms ‘Dark Age’ or ‘Dark Ages’ were widely used, until fairly recently, to refer to the centuries following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, often taken to coincide with the toppling of the last Western Emperor in the year 476 CE.

The Dark Ages were contrasted with the Classical Age in European history, Greece with its philosophical and proto-scientific legacy; Rome with its remarkable  engineering and architectural achievements, as well as its legal system and cultural achievements – not least the Latin alphabet we use today. These were complex and sophisticated societies, in anyone’s terms.

According to the old conventional wisdom, all this was overturned when Rome was overwhelmed by invading barbaric tribes – the Goths, the Vandals, and Suevis and several others. All those achievements were cast down, as societies reverted to a primitive state.

To sum up, the civilization of the Western classical world was destroyed, and it took the best part of half a millennium for European civilization to start to recover.

But was it? Nowadays, the very term ‘civilization’ raises hackles in academic circles, let alone any talk of contrasting a civilized state of society with a primitive, barbarous condition indicated by a term like ‘Dark Ages’. If you Google ‘Dark Ages’, a bunch of items pop up with titles like The Dark Ages weren’t as dark as we thought.

You could say that talk of ‘Dark Ages’ has become pretty much verboten in respectable academia. It reeks of odious cultural comparisons, even – shock horror – making value judgments about what happened. 

Some of the scholarly literature actually denies the Western Roman Empire ever fell at all, but rather underwent a kind of transformation as the invaders in effect took it over, making some changes along the way that we should not think of as retrograde. Even the barbarian invasions themselves are downgraded to essentially a migratory phenomenon.

None of this seems particularly surprising given the climate in postmodern academia. No doubt the old viewpoint would be denounced as racist, were it not for the inconvenient fact that those seen as barbarous were overwhelmingly of Germanic origin – quintessential ‘white people’ - toppling a civilization of people of darker Mediterranean skin tones.

I recently read what seems like a decisive demolition of the new orthodoxy by the Oxford historian and archaeologist Bryan Ward-Perkins. Here is what he says in his book The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization:

The new orthodoxy is that the Roman world, in both East and West, was slowly, and essentially painlessly, ‘transformed’ into a medieval form. However, there is an insuperable problem with this new view: it does not fit the mass of archaeological evidence now available, which shows a startling decline in western standards of living during the fifth to seventh centuries…[which] was no mere transformation, [but] a decline on a scale that can reasonably be described as ‘the end of a civilization’

So the Dark Ages really were dark. Life sucked for the overwhelming majority of people. 

Ward-Perkins maintains there is a lesson for us in this. Here is the concluding paragraph of his book:

There is a real danger for the present day in a vision of the past that explicitly sets out to eliminate all crisis and all decline. The end of the Roman West witnessed horrors and dislocation of a kind I sincerely hope never to have to live through; and it destroyed a complex civilization, throwing the inhabitants of the West back to a standard of living typical of prehistoric times. Romans before the fall were as certain as we are today that their world would continue for ever substantially unchanged. They were wrong. We would be wise not to repeat their complacency.

To which I say, as a former politician, I say: Hear, hear!

I will now elaborate, starting with what I think is a statement of the obvious. We are living in an era when the civilizational tectonic plates are shifting. What might this imply for the future of societies like ours?

Back in the early 1990s in the wake of the ending of the Cold War two rival prognoses for the future of the world were put forward. On the one hand, Francis Fukuyama famously asserted that we were seeing the end of history, by which he meant that social and cultural evolution of humanity had pretty much ended with the triumph of liberal democracy and market economics. There was, in his view, no viable alternative way to organize a modern society.

In opposition to this Samuel Huntington, another American political theorist, posited a clash of civilizations. In his view, the main conflicts in the 21st century would be along cultural and civilizational lines in contrast to the wars of ideology that featured large in the 20th century.

We can now, I think, see that Fukuyama’s vision has been shown wrong and Huntington vindicated. The most significant development has been that the communist party regime in mainland China, having carefully studied the collapse of the Soviet bloc, has managed to develop a governance model that combines a limited form of market economics, depending heavily on participation in global markets, with an autocratic Leninist state structure.

The view, widely held in leading circles in the West, that incorporating China into global markets and institutions like the WTO would inevitably lead to political liberalization, has not been vindicated, to put it mildly, as autocratic rule has not just been sustained in China but seems to be evolving to a kind technologically based totalitarianism using the most advanced surveillance techniques coupled with artificial intelligence to process the data. 

To stress what should be obvious my comments reflect no animus against Chinese people and Chinese culture. They are solely aimed at the repressive regime that now controls that country. I often think of the other China on the island of Taiwan, that has achieved broadly based prosperity and a well ordered society with free speech and democratic governance. Its response to the current pandemic is an example for the whole world. How appalling that governments, corporations, and institutions all over the world have been bullied into treating it as a pariah.

The other major emergent force that should concern us is the revival of militant political Islam, operating on a global scale, and increasingly assertive in the Western world, especially those countries in Western Europe with large immigrant populations from the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia. According to the historian Niall Ferguson this has produced a civilizational divide within these countries, running right through the middle of their major urban centres. 

Why should this bother us? Again, I hold no animus against Muslims as people, but I do think it important to consider certain features of the Islamic creed that make very problematical its relationship to liberal societies. The key problem is that Islam does not envisage – indeed is incapable of envisaging – a clear separation between civil and religious realms.

There is lot to be said about this, but consider the question of human rights. In 1948 the UN adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which, among other things, asserts rights to freedom of thought, opinion, and religion. Back then, most Islamic states, with the important exception of Saudi Arabia, signed on.

However with the global revival of militant political Islam the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, which represents the 57 Muslim majority states, decided to adopt a rival declaration, the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam,  which stipulates clearly that all rights are subject to Sharia. For example, it says:

Everyone shall have the right to express his opinion freely in such manner as would not be contrary to the principles of the Sharia. Everyone shall have the right to advocate what is right, and propagate what is good, and warn against what is wrong and evil according to the norms of Islamic Sharia.

These two conceptions of human rights are like chalk and cheese, and are already producing serious tensions in some Western countries, such as the controversy about the scores of Sharia courts now operating in the UK.

A key difference between what we face today and the Cold War is that, in the Cold War era, the rival blocs were largely – not totally, but largely - hermetically separated. Nowadays, as a result of global economic integration and massive population movements, these rival cultures and value systems face each other cheek-by-jowl. They have been woven into the interstices of all liberal democratic societies, and are able to exploit to the full the vulnerabilities that attend the political freedoms that exist in such societies. 

Our ability to respond to these major external challenges is severely compromised by the baleful influence of the identity politics ideology that is all pervasive in Western academia and its diffusion to all tiers of the education system, the media, the political class, and business elites – most importantly, the giant social media corporations that now act as the gatekeepers to the digital ‘public square’. 

I posted a series of polemical articles denouncing this ideology on the forum website last year. The articles contend that there is nothing progressive about it and that in key respects it is the opposite of what it claims to be. Rather than being anti-racist, it is inherently racist and acts to perpetuate racial divisions; rather than being helpful to disadvantaged groups, when translated into political action it positively harms them. 

And it is deeply reactionary, effectively repudiating the Enlightenment inheritance that I always regarded as being constitutive of any worthwhile leftist politics.

The last of these articles, which I posted about a year ago, goes further and argues that identity politics threatens ‘civilization as we know it’. The article is by far the longest in the set, running to over 25,000 words, I guess making it a small book. 

I will try to encapsulate the essential argument.

It starts with that word ‘civilization’ that postmodern academia seems to have such a problem with. I mentioned at the start that it is nowadays unfashionable to suggest there was a Dark Age that marked the end of a distinctive civilization and its replacement by something fundamentally different. 

The same mentality was echoed in the recent debate over the Ramsay proposal to establish some small programs devoted to the study of Western civilization in Australian universities. Such programs, it was said, would inevitably be Eurocentric, racist, and even ‘white supremacist’, devoted to the glories of the West and ignoring the crimes of colonialism, slavery and so on. This despite the Ramsay CEO Simon Haines making clear that such studies would take a ‘warts and all’ approach.

Some, like the international academic celebrity Kwame Anthony Appiah, take matters further and deny that there is any such thing as a distinctive Western civilization at all. In an article in the Guardian he contends that there are no civilizations as such, just different combinations of interesting and generally benign cultural traits. He lumps together music, cuisine, dress, religion and values, and suggests they can be mixed and matched to taste in his ideal multicultural nirvana.

The absurdity of his contention is revealed in these two sentences from his article:

No Muslim essence stops the inhabitants of Dar al-Islam from taking up anything from western civilisation, including Christianity or democracy. No western essence is there to stop a New Yorker of any ancestry taking up Islam.

Is he serious? What about the small matter of apostasy, that all the main schools of Islamic jurisprudence state should be punished by death, reflected in the criminal code of a dozen Islamic states?

In stark contrast to the virulent hostility to Ramsay, there has been next to no complaint from students or university staff organizations about the presence of thirteen Confucius Centres funded by the Chinese regime in Australian universities.

In the article I mentioned above I cite clear evidence that, far from being innocently focused on cultural exchange, these centres are an integral part of the Chinese Communist party’s global ‘soft propaganda’ apparatus, a point explicitly acknowledged by senior Chinese regime officials. More sinister is evidence cited in a report by the National Association of Scholars in America that these centres have a role in surveillance of Chinese students, orchestrating campaigns against dissidents, and even espionage.

Clive Hamilton, who will be speaking to our forum next Saturday, wrote an article that appeared in the Australian newspaper on Wednesday last about a sustained, and vicious, campaign against Drew Pavlou, an undergraduate philosophy student at the University of Queensland who organized demonstrations in support of the democracy campaigners in Hong Kong.

According to Hamilton:

He then was targeted by a torrent of online hate and death threats from patriotic Chinese students. China’s consul-general in Brisbane, Xu Jie, praised the violence, drawing a rebuke from Foreign Minister Marise Payne. Pavlou decided to seek a protection order against the consul-general through the courts.

Incredibly, as Hamilton describes in the article, the administration of Queensland University actually joined in the persecution of this student, mobilizing its law firm Clayton-Utz and summoning him to a secret disciplinary hearing at which he faces possible expulsion. 

The sad reality is that Australian universities have become so dependent on student fees and other income from China that they feel compelled to act in this way – with minimal to no resistance from individuals and groups that imagine themselves progressive.

This is just one instance of the compromising of free speech rights in education institutions across the western world. How lamentable that a regime intent on creating a new, more perfect totalitarianism through algorithmic governance can force Australian universities to act as censors and tolerate outright thuggery directed at dissidents.

In the long article I also talk about the clout Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states are bringing to bear on Middle Eastern Studies centres around the world, especially the US and the UK, through the enormous funds they channel into these institutions. Perhaps the most sinister aspect of this is the incentive for researchers to self-censor, avoiding topics that might displease their sponsors. An article in the online magazine Vox cites a Middle East expert who states:

I could write about Saudi sectarianism, but then I might lose some money,' the expert said, explaining the thoughts a Gulf-funded scholar might have. 'I could write about UAE human rights abuses, but, you know, there are abuses everywhere, and there are a million other things I can write about.'

Then we have the ANU here in Australia, which rejected Ramsay funding but is quite happy to accept funding from Iran and other unsavoury regimes for its Middle East Studies Centre.

The lack of resistance to these encroachments on the integrity and independence of higher education in the Western world is both remarkable and lamentable. The French writer Pascal Bruckner describes the pathological culture that explains this behaviour in his book The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism where he sums it up this way:

Indulgence toward foreign dictatorships, intransigence toward our democracies. An eternal movement: critical thought, at first subversive, turns against itself and becomes a new conformism, but one that is sanctified by the memory of its former rebellion. Yesterday’s audacity is transformed into cliches. Remorse has ceased to be connected with precise historical circumstances; it has become a dogma, a spiritual commodity, almost a form of currency.

This would be bad enough if confined to universities and intellectual circles where, as research by the American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has shown, there is something approaching an ideological monoculture. But it is not. With large proportions of young people nowadays going to university, this ideology has spread from humanities and social science faculties to all levels of the education system, government, politics, and the corporate sector.

Given the situation I have just described I believe there is no more important priority than to defend freedom of speech. Until quite recently, the importance of this key legacy of the Enlightenment was common ground across the mainstream political and ideological spectrum.

This is no longer the case. In recent years we have become accustomed to an ever growing plethora of legal restraints on speech in the form of subjectively defined hate speech laws that, in addition to intimidation, restrict what is sayable on the basis of ‘offense’ or ‘insult’. In countries, such laws are very aggressively enforced to the point where, in the UK for example, around 15,000 prosecutions are launched every year.

In some extraordinary recent cases people have been interrogated by police even when no offense has been committed – just to ‘check their thinking’. Some recent judicial judgments in Europe amount to the introduction of a de facto blasphemy prohibition in cases where the tenets of Islam, in particular, are criticised. 

Possibly more important than the legal restraints is the censorious climate that pervades many institutions in both the public and private sector whenever some offense against the latest iteration of the ever-changing identarian ideology is committed. Such an offense, even if trivial, can lead to social and professional death.

The external forces of totalitarian can easily manipulate this mentality for their own purposes, as when the travel bans imposed on China to avoid spread of the coronavirus were denounced as ‘xenophobic’ and ‘racist’, to be reliably echoed by a certain kind of ‘progressive’. 

And any attempt to raise problematical aspects of the Islamic creed are likely to be denounced as ‘Islamophobic’, viewed as a species of racism, and can lead to prosecution in some European countries. A YouGov poll in Britain showed one third of respondents fearful of expressing their real views about contentious topics, such as immigration and religion.

This mentality has a stupefying effect on the ability to hold honest debates about some of the most important issues we face. One of the cardinal virtues of post-Enlightenment Western Civilization is its self-reflective capacity that has provided an important impetus for reform. In the age of identity politics this virtue has morphed into a morbid civilizational self-loathing.

What hope for free speech, with these looming external totalitarian threats and the scope for honest debate stymied? Could future historians look back on the free societies that emerged after the Enlightenment as a short, historical blip? I would like to think not, but we better stop taking them for granted.