Do you hear the Sirens Singing?

Equity, de-colonisation, anti-colonialism.  Three buzz words that have long-brewed in the teapots of smoke-filled Common Rooms in the Political Studies departments of many a western university.  They have in recent years spilled out into the world, scalding society, making it leap around and howl in pain.  In the UK, my own university of Sheffield has been at the forefront, even as it has slipped inexorably down the World Rankings and dropped out on the Top 100 for the first time this year.  Towards the end of last year Professor Lambert, the University Vice-Chancellor announced a thorough de-colonisation of the curriculum was to be undertaken, in response to the protests of activist students.  It is of course tempting to link the falling standards and reputation of the university with its adoption of extreme Left ideology as its central philosophical tenet, but I am sorry to say the decline probably started much earlier.

Anti-colonialism and de-colonisation lay down the premise that the European expansion and empire building of the sixteenth to the nineteenth century was injurious to the lands and peoples conquered, not only then but on a permanent and on-going basis.  It suggests that permanent inequalities have been baked into global society with Europe values, intellectual, philosophical, cultural (collectively known as ‘white supremacy’ or ‘whiteness’) and wealth, holding down the non-white peoples of the world from prospering and flourishing on their own terms and expressing their own cultural values.  The experience of African-American slavery in the US from the early seventeenth to the mid nineteenth century, is the paradigm in which these theories have been developed and from which they are applied to other regions of the world.  The application of these tenets of anti-colonialism and de-colonisation manifest themselves in many and various ways, the writing out of history of anyone with links to slavery or the slave trade, on the insistence that the moral failure of slave-owning far outweighs any other good or achievement they may have to their name, is the application on an individual level.  The toppling of the statue of Edward Colston, the wealthy Bristol philanthropist, whose endowments benefited centuries of Bristol people – but whose wealth was built on slave-trading – is the best-known example in the UK.  On the macro scale the movement seeks to alter perceptions of history, re-casting the British story as one of rape, pillage and plunder, declaring that the wealth of Britain was built on the backs of slaves.  On the back of this declaration comes the demand that reparations be paid to countries who haves suffered these historic evils.  So, for example, during their recent trip to the Caribbean, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, the future King and Queen, were faced with demands that reparations be paid to the island nations they visited, to right historic wrongs.  Never mind that Britain already subsidises these independent nations with many millions of pounds of aid and services annually.  Which would they rather, a one-off payment or ongoing support?  One look at the massive fraud conducted by the Black Lives Matter movement in the US and I think it is clear that those who make these calls are chiefly engaged in lining their own pockets.

Industrialisation, not slavery, the source of British wealth

The premise that the colonial era empires irreparably damaged the lands and societies under European control needs to be fundamentally challenged.  The European expansion took place in response to a world-shattering event for the European continent and culture.  1453 saw the Ottoman Turks capture of Constantinople, the Romano-Greek Christian empire that had stood for over 1000 years at the eastern end of the Mediterranean, and the start of a 200 year drive by the Ottomans westward and northward towards the heartlands of western, Catholic Christianity.  The fall of Constantinople was simultaneously an existential threat to European culture and an economic crisis caused by the severing of the overland trade routes to India, China and the Far East.  Within decades the Portugese were sailing south along the Atlantic coast of Africa in search of a route eastward while the Spanish sailed westward, Columbus stumbling across the American continents as he searched for a route to the Far East Spice islands.  The Dutch, English and French were soon to follow, all eager for trade and new lands in a rivalry that was to erupt time and again into warfare over the subsequent centuries, until the British victories over France at Trafalgar (1805) and Waterloo (1815) settled the matter for a hundred years.  During this period of approximately 400 years the European nations underwent a radical social transformation unlike anything seen for millennia – the Industrial Revolution.  The Industrial Revolution, rather than Agrarian slavery, was the true source of the wealth and power of Britain and the European nations. The lands and people that the industrialised Europeans encountered were woefully ill-equipped to meet the newcomers, as ill-equipped as we would be today if aliens from space were to land among us.  Even the advanced civilisations such as India and China were completely outclassed technologically, what hope for the Stone Age societies such as those found in North and South America, sub-Saharan Africa and Australia?  No wheel, little writing or metalwork, often times addicted to slavery and human sacrifice; the savage was not ‘noble’ as Rousseau would have us believe but ignorant and barbaric.  Many though the crimes of the imperial powers might have been, what was happening was the forging of the modern world and all the peoples of the world have benefited from that.

Pol Pot

To de-colonise society thoroughly requires the annihilation of the modern world and the reversal to the status quo ante of the late fifteenth century. To show how ridiculous the proposal is let us imagine the de-colonisation of the menu: no spices (no curries), no potatoes (no chips), no tomatoes (no ketchup), no tea from India or sugar from the Caribbean, or perhaps we can do without such old slave grown staples such as cotton and tobacco, or new slave products like marijuana, opium and heroin?  But if it is right that the white man de-colonises in repentance of the ‘horrors’ he has inflicted and avers the benefits he has received, it must be right that the non-white also refuses all the benefits that they may have accrued by the suffering of their forefathers. For the supposed victims of empire and white supremacy, perhaps they can do without the English language and the internet, or the fundamental laws of maths, physics and chemistry?  No electricity, nuclear power, vaccinations, antibiotics or genetics.    Only this way can the slate be wiped clean. Equity is all, is it not?  Perhaps Pol Pot was right when he said, ‘We will burn the old grass and the new will grow.’ Perhaps all must be destroyed for a new, equitable society to spring up. That is the song being sung from the smoke-filled Common Rooms of Political Studies departments.

The call for de-colonisation is a siren song leading the West to destruction.  It may have a superficial allure but to follow its call will inevitably lead us onto the rocks of philosophical doom and the destruction of western civilisation.