from The Public Discourse
The typical liberal virtues of respect and tolerance are far too thin. They need a wider array of supporting virtues: humility, docility, temperance, courage, etc. And that such traits are virtues is not obvious to every worldview.
Lord Nigel Biggar, CBE, is Emeritus Regius Professor of Moral Theology at the University of Oxford and Distinguished Scholar in Residence at Pusey House, Oxford. He is the author of several books, including (most recently) The New Dark Age: Why Liberals Must Win the Culture Wars. For the past decade, Lord Biggar has been embroiled in controversies surrounding his efforts to interrogate the ethics of “empire” and, specifically, the British Empire. The following conversation with his former doctoral student, Matthew Lee Anderson, has been lightly edited for clarity.
Matthew Lee Anderson: You begin by arguing that the culture wars are real and important. As a frame, “culture war” has governed American public discourse for the last forty years or so. What are the similarities and differences that you see between the American context and the British context?
Nigel Biggar: I am interested to hear you trace the culture wars in the U.S. back several decades, because it is not something we have talked about in the UK until the last ten years. One reason that you ended up in a culture war over abortion was that the U.S. Supreme Court presumed to make a judgment that, frankly, your legislators should have made. We in the UK passed our first liberal abortion law in 1967, but because the law was passed by Parliament, not by a court, it did not become quite as polarizing. The other reason our culture war came later is that the BBC has a public service duty to present public controversies and manage them in a balanced fashion, giving equal airtime, more or less, to different sides of the debate. We have had institutions that contain these highly controversial issues in a way that the U.S. has lacked.
For us, the culture wars are much more recent concerning three things: colonial history, transgender identity, and the issues of race and racism. The colonial history issue came alive in 2015 and 2016 because of the Rhodes Must Fall agitation in Oxford, which was imported from South Africa, not the U.S. The racism issue exploded here as a direct result of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the upsurge of BLM in the States, which was exploited by professional antiracist bodies here. And transgender questions are all of our own making, really. The racial front of the cultural war was heavily influenced by American controversies, though we are the ones who imported radical race politics from America. But the histories of the culture wars in the two countries are not identical by any means.
MLA: What do you think are the downsides of importing war metaphors into social relationships?