The Silence of the Learned

by Theodore Dalrymple (April 2026)

I think that I must have been doing something wrong, or at least that I have not been outspoken enough: for the fact is that I have never been censored, cancelled or de-platformed, hardly even abused or insulted. From this I conclude that I count for very little in the world, in which the level of opprobrium a person receives is the measure of his importance.

Of course, to be de-platformed one has first to be platformed. This I very rarely am: and I am not sorry about it, either. On the contrary I am rather relieved not to be invited often. I mostly accept such invitations as I receive, and then, as the time for their fulfilment approaches, I begin to suffer from regret that I ever accepted them. Public speaking is not my forte, besides which I always feel obliged to prepare something new, which is time-consuming. I do not like to repeat myself, and I do not have to hand a talk that may be adapted to any occasion or subject, as some accomplished speakers seem to have. Besides, Verba volant, scripta manent, as the Romans used to say: the spoken word flies away, the written word remains (at least in theory). And since I live at a distance from any location at which anyone is likely to invite me to speak, save for my local historical society, there is the time spent in travelling to be added to the time spent on preparation. No, I am glad not to be invited often.

I am therefore not in a position personally to assess the influence of cancel-culture on intellectual and cultural life. I live far from the groves of academe and hear only from afar murmurs or rumours of  despair at the increasing intolerance, ideological conformity and intimidation to be found in the once ivory towers of universities. It is true that from time to time I hear stories from young postulants for university posts of the declarations of fealty to the prevailing ideology of diversity, equity and inclusion that they are obliged to make if they wish to be considered for posts, which confronts them with a dilemma: either to comply with the requirement and despise themselves ever after for their own careerism, or not to comply and thereby abandon their academic ambitions and careers. But I have no real idea of the scale, prevalence or seriousness of the problem of ideological conformity in universities.

Insofar as there is nothing quite like personal experience to bring a bad situation to the forefront of one’s mind and make one think about it seriously, I am not, perhaps, the person best qualified to speak on the situation in universities: except that the overemphasis on what is called ‘lived experience’ is precisely one of sources of our ideological malaise. The person best qualified to speak, however, is he who has both lived experience and a willingness and ability to analyse its significance and meaning in an intellectually scrupulous manner.

Such a person is Professor Nigel Biggar, who, in a short and incisive book titled The New Dark Age, analyses the causes of the slide of universities into the realm of ideological dictatorship and witch-hunts, such that one is now more likely to have an open-minded discussion on many important subjects with a skilled tradesman than with a university lecturer or professor.

Biggar writes of the universities because it is the milieu that he knows best, but he is surely right in arguing that what happens in universities is of enormous significance for the whole of society, even if most people in society have little contact, or little continuing contact, with the university milieu. This is because the cultural, intellectual and ultimately economic ‘tone’ of a society is bound to be set by what goes on in universities, all the more so since so many people now attend them (though in the past, when they were more elitist, they were also of great social significance, out of all proportion with their demographic weight).

He does not resort to what is now a cliché, the long march through the institutions, to describe what has happened, but a cliché often encapsulates a truth (which is why it becomes a cliché in the first place). A relatively small number of ideological fanatics or monomaniacs has managed to institute something approaching a reign of terror in universities, and since people do not like to consider themselves to be terrified, because then they feel that they are cowards, they persuade themselves that what terrifies them is actually true or the truth. If, for example, the ideologues of transsexualism exert a power of excommunication over people, those who want to avoid excommunication persuade themselves that it really is true that a man can become a woman, simpliciter, or vice versa, though a still small voice might whisper somewhere in their minds that this is rubbish, nonsense.

Unfortunately, such still small voices have the effect of rendering people, who in their hearts remain unconvinced, all the more vehement, their own shouting an attempt to drown out the still small voice. Moreover, monomaniacs always enjoy an advantage over the more balanced: for people are inclined romantically to suppose that those who express themselves so forcefully and unequivocally must have some good reason to do so.

Perhaps the most startling thing Biggar’s book is the analogy that he draws between the universities today and those of Germany just before and during the Nazi regime.

It is often forgotten that students in Germany were more Nazi than the general population. There had been an intellectual revolt, in part justified, against the facile optimism of the Enlightenment, when reason alone was thought to be sufficient for mankind to arrive at or upon the sunny uplands of complete social harmony, freedom and happiness. Man is a reasoning animal, but not just a reasoning animal: it is always true, and will always be true, that the heart has its reasons that reason knows not of.

But this is all the more reason to hold fast to reason itself, and not a reason to abandon it altogether, for unbridled passion is a fearful determinant of conduct. The glorification of the irrational, of blood over the brain, of the Dionysian over the Apollonian, is no solution to the insufficiency of reason in human existence.

German academics, who then perhaps enjoyed the most prestige of any academics in the world, failed completely the test of Nazism. It is not that they were convinced Nazis: most of them were not. But their moral courage was not equal to their intellectual prominence, and they were prey to normal human failings (or what are failings in certain circumstances), such as the desire for a quiet life, the wish for career advancement, the need to earn a family living, and so forth, that permitted them to close their eyes to the obvious moral monstrosity by which they were surrounded. They had not the courage to face down the activist students of their time, whose strength of conviction was inversely proportional to its intellectual solidity. I should add, of course, that the dismissal of Jewish staff gave the other academics the opportunity, which they were not slow to seize, of swift economic advancement.

The analogy with the present situation within universities is obvious: though it should not be pressed too far. The analogy is a warning, not a fatality, much less an exact copy. Still, the intoning of ‘It can’t happen here’ and ‘Never again!’ is not sufficient defence against those who would impose ideological uniformity and conformity on universities—and ultimately on society itself—as did the Nazis.

In this book, Biggar describes his own experience of the failure of academics to defend freedom of thought, opinion and research. He had written a book which attempted to assess the balance of good done and evil perpetrated by the British Empire, in a calm, rational and dispassionate way, according to the best evidence he could find. He recounts how a publisher commissioned and edited the book but then refused to publish it as it had agreed to do, probably because of ideological pressure from the publisher’s young employees, almost certainly recent graduates of the very universities that have become mills for turning out ideological clones. The publisher’s efforts at self-justification were pathetic and would have been funny if such pusillanimity had not caused Biggar much anguish. (The story had a happy ending, however: another publisher undertook to publish the book and it probably sold in greater numbers than it would have done had the first publisher not refused to publish it: a useful reminder that all is not lost, and incidentally evidence that publishers these days are not driven by purely commercial considerations, since the first publisher always thought that Biggar’s book would sell in sufficient numbers to make it commercially worthwhile, even very worthwhile. Ordinarily, we should be delighted that publishers have considerations other than purely commercial in their activities, but our delight should be tempered by an awareness of what those other considerations are. Some are good, and some are bad.)

Those whom Biggar had thought were colleagues and even friends melted away, like frost in the sun, when it was time to defend his right to express views that ran against the current orthodoxies, but were nevertheless based upon proper research. His opponents did not discuss with him, they shouted him down; they employed all the dark arts and infinite resources of the argumentum ad hominem to discredit him. What is particularly alarming about the pusillanimity displayed by academics in current circumstances (their private views are often very different from those that they are prepared to express in public) is that we do not yet live in a fully Stalinist society, and the penalties for speaking out are not yet the Gulag or ten years’ imprisonment without rights of correspondence (a euphemism in Stalin’s time for a bullet in the back of the head).

Bullying and sentimentality often go together, as mutual handmaidens. Thanks to the irrationalist nature of postmodernism, persons who come from a certified victim group have to be listened to by members of the ex officio oppressor group with a kind of uncritical reverence, as if they were incapable of error and untruth. Their lived experience, as they call it, must be taken as unquestionable evidence, even if their lived experience consists largely of subjective feeling and interpretation of events that are capable of other interpretations.

Of course, people’s experiences, and accounts of their experiences, are important. It is, after all, subjective experience that gives significance to life, for without it life would just be one physical phenomenon among others.

But experience is reflective, it is not the same as a straightforward physical phenomenon (if a physical phenomenon can ever be described as straightforward). I may say, because I am suffering from paranoia, that I find someone’s behaviour suspicious or threatening, in which case I as mistaken about it. My ‘lived experience’, as it is called, is not always sufficient to command the credence of others.

The overestimation of the importance of lived experience is sometimes encountered in medical practice. When I tried to reassure heroin addicts that withdrawal from heroin was not a serious medical condition, they would say, ‘How do you know, you’ve never gone through it?’ (They wanted to believe it was very serious to justify their continuation of their habit.) They would not believe me when I said that subjective experience is not the only way of assessing medical seriousness, and that the experience of withdrawal is in any case largely shaped by expectation. But they had been trained up, so to speak, by what might be called the zeitgeist to believe that ‘lived experience’ is the final court of appeal where evidence is concerned.

In the last analysis, this is frivolous, in the sense of being morally and intellectually unserious. But it is frivolity without gaiety, as it is earnest without seriousness. As Biggar intimates, such frivolity, now dominant in universities, is serious in its effects. It will destroy what is good and elevate what is bad. It will render us powerless to deal with real threat. It will institute lies and eliminate truth. It will bring ambitious and unscrupulous mediocrities to power—in fact, it has already done so in at least once country that I could name.

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Theodore Dalrymple’s latest books are Neither Trumpets nor Violins (with Kenneth Francis and Samuel Hux) and Ramses: A Memoir from New English Review Press.

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