Our academics are attacking the whole concept of knowledge

The first problem about decolonisation is the word itself. Colonisation is the process of establishing control over a foreign territory and its indigenous inhabitants, by settlement, conquest or political manipulation. But decolonisation? It has come to mean much more than the reversal of that process. Today, it refers to an altogether wider agenda, whose central objective is to discredit or downgrade the cultural achievements of the West. Objective truth and empirical investigation are mere western constructs. They are optional ideas which need have no weight beyond the western societies which invented them. But the West has imposed them on the rest of the world by a process akin to the colonial conquests of the past four centuries.

In New Zealand, this attitude to truth has led to a revised school syllabus in which Maori folk beliefs about the world are to be treated as if they were just as valid as the body of empirical knowledge that is called science everywhere else. However, we do not need to go to New Zealand to see intellectual decolonisation in action. University faculties in Britain are all expected to publish ‘decolonisation statements’ filled with guilt and angst about the western origin of so much modern knowledge.

Oxford University’s Mathematical, Physical and Life Sciences Division may seem an unpromising candidate for decolonisation, but its decolonisation statement attacks the whole concept of knowledge. ‘As we work towards greater inclusion’, it declares, ‘we need to have a broader understanding of what constitutes scientific knowledge.’ Among other things, this is said to involve ‘challenging western-centric ideas of “objectivity”, “expertise” and “merit” ’, and ‘removing structural hierarchies that privilege certain knowledge and certain peoples over others’. The instinct behind statements like these is not scholarly or scientific.