Review: ‘Against Decolonisation: Campus Culture Wars and the Decline of the West’. Doug Stokes. # 131. 26/09/2023.
Out of Many, One People.
Welcome, to the review of a book taking an unfashionable line that will almost certainly generate strong opinions for and against. Do let me know your views.
Review: ‘Against Decolonisation: Campus Culture Wars and the Decline of the West’. Doug Stokes. Polity Press.
Doug Stokes prefaces this book with the story of his great-grandfather, who wouldn’t ‘kill a fly’ but who committed suicide after the death of his son in an industrial accident, following the earlier deaths of two children from bronchitis. So, behind the book is a setting of working class suffering, decency and strong family identity. Stokes himself grew up in Hackney and left his comprehensive school at 17, before eventually following an academic career to become a professor at the Strategy and Security Institute at the University of Exeter. His background gives the book a different flavour to books defending the West by more ‘patrician’ writers such as Roger Scruton or Douglas Murray. Indeed there is a sort of ‘class’ element involved in his identification of the enemy as the Professional Managerial Class (PMC) that ‘has emerged under globalisation that secures hegemony through advancing a politics of vulnerability and the bureaucratic corralling of moralising coalitions around identity issues’ (p 14).
Such a class has emerged notably in the main but not exclusive focus of Stokes’s polemic: the universities. In chapter 2 he charts the spread in universities of the post George Floyd ‘moral panic’, craftily re-deploying a term hitherto mainly used by progressives to squash morally conservative pushbacks. Chapter 3 unpacks the exaggerations, distortions and simple lies involved in the PMC upscaling of alleged racism. Chapter 4 on ‘History Reclaimed’ sets out the philosophical and historical case for resisting the ‘decolonising’ agenda; continued in chapter 5’s account of ‘wokery’. In the Conclusion Stokes puts on his Strategy and Security professor’s cap and underlines the very serious consequences of the threat to democracy and free speech by decolonising’s undermining of the West’s confidence in its albeit flawed but nonetheless creditable history and values.
Main themes.
1. Exaggerating the extent of racism.
The decolonisation agenda only has moral power if it can indicate substantial disadvantage in Britain that can be laid at the door of racism. Stokes’ main case study of universities starts from the Equality and Human Rights Commission report of 2019 that ‘universities were not only out of touch with the extent that [racism] is occurring on their campuses, some are also completely oblivious to the issue’ (p 36) leading to the bureaucratic flourishing noted in the next section. Yet Stokes’ evidence is that this is simple exaggeration. Between 2006 and 2018 the biggest increase in university attendance was amongst black pupils. As regards staffing between 2003 and 2019 the proportion of black, Asian and minority ethnic members increased from 8.6% to 15.5% (p 60). Between 2014 and 2020 the biggest increase in first and 2:1 degrees was in the black ethnic group (p 69).
More generally only 2% of ethnic minority students felt that racial harassment was a big problem, with 8% thinking it was somewhat of a problem (p 56). Further where students had reported racial harassment to the university only 3% felt unhappy at how the university had handled the problem.
2. Bureaucratic enlargement.
Paralleled with the institutional exaggeration of racism is the growth of bodies to help institutions counter the inaccurately perceived racism. Thus Advance HE, a multimillion-pound publicly funded body that is ‘a single sector agency for equality and diversity, learning and teaching, and leadership and governance in higher education has set up a ‘Race Equality Charter’ to assess universities’ progress, much it would seem as Stonewall has set itself up as the public arbiter on issues of sexual diversity.
The result of such bureaucratisation a demand for more monitoring appointments (p 44), alongside a ‘58% increase in diversity and inclusion roles since 2015. . .UK organisations employ twice as many D&I professionals than any country in the world’ (p 72).
3. ‘White’ epistemology?
The decolonisation agenda goes deeper than experiences of racism to the very heart of what universities are doing – that is, that their whole way of communicating knowledge is shot through with ‘whiteness’; following on from a social deconstructivist theory of knowledge whereby our very understanding of the world is shaped by linguistic and social conditioning rather than by what is actually ‘out there’. Rather than simply modifying book lists, decolonisation, in the words of one advocate, ‘goes further and deeper in challenging the institutional hierarchy and monopoly of knowledge, moving out of a Western framework’ (p 33). For example this means, according to the King’s College Indigenous initiative, ‘exploring, testing and applying First Peoples-centred concepts and practices of research , exchange and teaching’.
The outcome of this epistemological confusion is that, according to Advance HE, ‘responsibilities for the inequalities of attainment’ are to be ‘placed with the institution’ not the student themselves (p 42), thus ‘avoiding a deficit model where solutions are aimed at changing the individual’ (p 45). The traditional model of learning is reversed: it is now the student voice that determines the flow of the education, not the university’s deposit of wisdom.
The upshot of the ‘moral panic’ that has destabilised universities confidence in their custodianship of a Western-originated but universally valuable mode of developing human understanding has, according to Stokes, led ‘to a profound degradation of campus life, helped to bolster the power of illiberal activists and senior university technocrats, threatened the keystone value of academic freedom, Infantilized staff and students, and has had broader social and political consequences for the UK (p 54)
4. Ignoring the white working class.
A major and somewhat unique undercurrent to Stokes’ critique of decolonisation is its attentiveness to the concerns of the white working class. Given his hostility to the PMC and hints of sympathy for Brexit he could, very unfairly, be caricatured as populist.
He writes of ‘Intersectional Illiberalism’ where ‘institutions ‘virtue signal’ and seek external accreditation around issues considered to be of sacred importance to intersectional. Ideology but ignore the principal vectors of disadvantage, as they carry little ideological or reputational weight - for example, social class. As such, actual and growing disparities continue to grow and fester, while building wider social resentment, not least when coupled with the toxic mix of elite disdain, moral hectoring and real-world immiseration, with majority populations increasingly under-represented or actively managed out of institutions that that have historically driven social mobility for all’ (p120). Adding insult to injury, being accused of ‘white privilege is factually inaccurate and morally repugnant’ (p 110).
Examples of such injustice abound:
* the proportion of pupils on free school meals entering further education in 2019 was 72.8% amongst Chinese background pupils, black African 59%, black Caribbean 31.8% and white British 16% (p 78). Unsurprisingly, the Parliamentary Education Select Committee commissioned a 2021 report on ‘The Forgotten: How White Working-Class Pupils Have Been Let Down, and How to Change It’ (p 11).
* the increase into higher education from state schools between 2006 and 2018 was from 21.6% to 41.2% for black pupils, 21.8% to 29.5% for white pupils (p 76). Accordingly ‘the lowest participation rates at universities are young men from white working-class backgrounds (p 63). Less than 20% of universities have Access and Participation Plans for white students from low-income neighbourhoods (p 77).
* the Labour Party’s 2022 rule book mentions black and ethnic minority representation 104 times whereas there are only two mentions of increased working-class representation (p 116).
5. Unwelcome truths.
As a reaction against racist accounts of black people in the past racial etiquette has often required that negative accounts of ethnic minorities be veiled over, inevitably tilting the balance to favour the decolonising case as well as implicitly undermining any sense of minority ethnic agency.
Undoubtedly there are damaging legacies of colonialism in Africa, not least national boundaries drawn up by Europeans without any reference to local ethnicities. But note also needs to be given to the fact that the post-colonial elite has stolen nearly $600 billions from resource-rich yet widely impoverished Nigeria (p 89). Historically the Sokoto Caliphate in west Africa was ‘one of the largest slave societies in modern history’ (p 98), whilst the ‘Customs of Dahomey’ annual celebration saw the public sacrifice of slaves, as many as 4,000 in 1727 (p 102). Blaming colonisation for all of Africa’s woes is simplistic.
6. Serious Consequences.
Stokes doesn’t often express this directly, but lying behind his whole argument is that the values the West stand for are contingent and fragile: ‘Human freedom and progress are not the natural order of things. They must be made and then defended’. This because ‘The desire to decolonise the Anglophone West and the adoption of identity politics by cultural and political elites are suicidal moves in the context of rising illiberal and authoritarian ‘civilisational states’ like China’ (p 15). So he asserts that the ‘US-led liberal international order has been remarkable in its capacity to advance human freedom, however stuttering that advance has been’; and goes on to laud the ‘incredible transformation of the global economy’: thus the drop in those living in extreme poverty between 1981 and 2015 from 44% of the world’s population to 10% (pp 144,145). Those who seek its ideological, political and economic deconstruction ‘should be careful what they wish for’ (p 15).
Useful Terms.
Armies need weapons and Stokes provides several phrases – some his own, some borrowed - that are useful in the culture wars. The following are terms that I think can valuably be recycled:
* judgemental relativism – ‘the advocacy of ‘indigenous’ knowledge or the castigation of white, Eurocentric curricula explicitly invokes judgemental relativism where all ideas are said to exist on an equal plane, regardless of their integrity’ (p 84).
* correspondence theory of knowledge – ‘primacy is placed on the correspondence between the immutable identity characteristics of a teacher and a student. . . an assumption that the optimal way to learn is to be taught by someone of your own racial identity’ (p 62).
* ‘univariate’ social-science analysis – ‘we cannot simply state that one variable (racism) explains this outcome’ (p 67); here with reference to explanations of differences in student attainments. More broadly its’ simplistic use is central to claims of systemic racism and to criticism of the Sewell Report.
* ‘perma-crisis of catastrophisation’ – ‘normalises the invocation of vulnerability, (so that) the prevention of the materialisation of these risks gives moral clout and political justification for PMC rule’ (p 134). The loose enlargement of the meaning of words such as ‘hurt’, ‘trauma’ and ‘safe’ are examples of the ‘concept creep’ that gives a false energy to our fear of racial and other forms of social catastrophe.
Overall, the case that Stokes makes against the policies he gathers under the theme of ‘decolonisation’ is a strong one, but inevitably in a fairly polemical book of only 150 pages of main text there are nuances missed. For example, whilst it is easy to brush aside concern about micro-aggressions as over-precious, nonetheless more attention needs to be given to those who experience them: ‘There is a change in the attitude when they [academics] address you. And you can feel it’ (p 73, from an EHRC document). Recurring ‘minor’ events can accrue to form a depressing backdrop to life. Similarly, whilst it is true that slavery has been endemic across both places and times, Caribbean slavery was distinct in that not only was it racially based, but it created island societies that existed for nothing other than slave based, highly profitable production.
‘Decline of the West’ may seem alarmist but in a world marked by the growth of a variety of conflicts his concern about the harm caused by ‘the centrality of identity, the ubiquity of racism and the morally compromised nature of Western civilisation’ (p 3)is well-placed. In ‘Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism’ (2014) Larry Siedentop concluded “if we in the West do not understand the moral depth of our own tradition, how can we hope to shape the conversation of mankind?’ (p 363). Whilst Stokes neglects to give weight to the central place of Christian understanding in forming that tradition in the way that Siedentop did, both share a serious concern about the failure within the West to defend that tradition in a world of increasing ideological conflict, not only by failing to understand it (Siedentop), but now increasingly, as Stokes indicates, by consciously demeaning it.