It’s hard to come up with a less sexy title for a conference than ‘the Alliance For Responsible Citizenship,’ the name of the big London event going on this week, hosted by Jordan Peterson and other worthies. It is likely that the organizers came up with the idea of building an ‘ark,’ as in Noah’s apocalypse boat, and came up with a phrase to suit the acronym. Whatever. Recent history has made this meeting, which has gathered over 1,000 people from all over the world, a lot more ‘arky’ than could have been imagined.
Alas, the presentations from the stage have been hit and miss. Konstantin Kisin, the British-Russian comedian and co-host, electrified the room with a Tuesday morning speech exhorting the crowd to wake up and understand that they are tasked with nothing less than waging a war for Western civilization.
“We are in the fight of our lives,” he said.
And if courage means anything, it means doing the right thing and being willing to take the punishment if you have to. Let me say it again: all death is certain. We don’t get to choose whether we live or die. We only get to choose if we live before we die.
It was the ideal speech for the moment. The same week, in the same city, British Muslims have been taking to the street in mass protests expressing solidarity with butchers of Israeli Jews. They have done the same thing in Europe and North America, and have been joined by unnerving numbers of leftist allies, particularly on university campuses. Kisin perfectly expressed the shock of the now.
At the opposite end was the opening day address excreted by ousted U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. It’s hard to overstate its cluelessness. McCarthy gibbered on offering repeated paeans to Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, both of whom left office over three decades ago. The Zombie Reaganaut decried that “individuals no longer believe in personal responsibility,” deployed a George W. Bush trope to denounce the “new Axis of Evil,” and lamented our collective weakness “in the face of authoritarians who despise our freedom.” He name-checked the “Shining City On A Hill,” and raised the aspirational standard of limited government. McCarthy even—I’m not making this up—took the opportunity to trash poor old Jimmy Carter.
This farrago of stale right-wing cliches by a man who was until a few weeks ago one of the two most senior Republican leaders in the nation was vivid testimony to why the GOP has been and is as useless as teats on a boar. I left the hall actually angry, reminded why I remain a conservative, but left the Republican Party in disgust back in 2008. Every conference-goer that I polled about the talk was viscerally appalled by its almost surreal disconnection with real-world conditions in 2023.
Political conservatism in the U.S. is led by unimaginative drones who have learned nothing from its failures in the past two decades or more, and by a clown who reflects the degraded vox populi, but who is as far from being the leader the crisis-ridden West needs now as Charlie Chaplin was from being Churchill. It was useful to get that learned, I guess.
There is an equal level of bilious cynicism among British conservatives here about the fecklessness of the Conservative Party. Said one to me as we stood on line to get in on the first day, “If things in this country have reached this appalling state under thirteen years of Conservative government, think how much worse it’s going to be when Labour get in.” I missed the Tuesday address by senior Tory politician Michael Gove, but one English wit said of it, “That wasn’t bad; it would be nice if he believed a word of it.”
Most of the speeches oscillated around a mediocre middle—about what you would expect from a conference built around the idea of “responsible citizenship.” The Catholic bishop Robert Barron’s address on morality and meaning was a notable exception. Bishop Barron might be the only cleric alive who can explain for a general audience what the medieval friar William of Ockham’s idea of nominalism has to do with our meaning crisis.
An Anglican churchman remarked to me, “If we just had one bishop like Robert Barron in the Church of England, things would be so much better.” To which I replied, “No doubt, but the problem with the Catholic Church is it has only one bishop like Robert Barron.”
Sir Paul Marshall, the wealthy British investor, delivered a rousing and substantive address denouncing the role capitalists have played in weakening our civilization, and calling for reform. This was the kind of thing people came to hear, and needed to hear. But later, the U.S. whiz kid presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy beamed in from the campaign trail to yammer on about corporate something or other. I exited for the lobby.
It turns out that the lobby, the spacious, well-lighted area where the delegates meet for coffee between and during sessions, is where the most important action at the ARC is happening. This is where people from around the world meet, talk, and build networks. It doesn’t sound very exciting, perhaps, but you should have been there to hear the conversations.
This is the kind of thing I’m talking about. A young French man based in Brussels approached me and told me that a prominent and socially-engaged investor is funding the construction of an intentional Catholic community in Normandy, inspired by my 2017 book The Benedict Option. I had no idea! I would like to go visit and write about this, I said, to give hope and ideas to others. The Frenchman offered to put us in touch.
We talked for maybe five minutes, but made a connection that could bear good fruit in helping to construct arks. Maybe not, but if not for what Jordan Peterson convened here in the London Docklands, most of us never would have met face to face. If nothing else, it is invigorating to talk with people from around the globe who see things more or less the same way you do. It makes you feel less alone—like you are part of a pilgrimage, not just a lonely tourist.
This solidarity is even more important than the ARC founders could have foreseen when they began planning the meeting many months ago. The pro-Hamas mass demonstrations happening throughout the West are shocks that still palpably reverberate among the people here. The Brits are especially hard hit. You couldn’t swing a dead cat in the lobby without hitting Britons prepared to talk about the prospect of migrating out of a country they fear is lost. If they doubted the UK’s future before October 7, the apocalyptic unveiling of vast numbers of pro-terror, antisemitic Muslims living among them has been the bitterest blackpill imaginable.
“I’m going to stay till the bitter end,” said one man, “but I don’t know if my children have a future in this country.” Two young Christian women who are engaged in conservative causes told me their circles are discussing the prospects of exiting the cities with their families and building Benedict Option communities in the countryside.
Others, knowing that I live in Budapest, inquire about the potential to emigrate to the country governed by Viktor Orban, whose warnings about mass migration—long despised by the great and the good throughout the West—are now being vindicated with horrific force. Said one English Christian woman, “Hungary is our Israel.”
She meant that Hungary—which, having relatively few Muslim immigrants, has been free of pro-Hamas demonstrations, and whose government is not ashamed to defend traditional Christian and Western values—is a place to which Christians can escape threats from domestic Muslims. It is also, she imagines, a place where one does not have to endure persecution from contemptible British institutions like London’s Metropolitan police. The coppers were captured on a viral video yesterday arresting an older working-class man who had filmed Palestinian flags festooning the streets of his neighborhood, criticized the flags, and posted that clip to his Facebook page.
Let me make the point clear. While pro-Hamas mobs clogged the busy Liverpool station and gathered outside the Prime Minister’s residence chanting Allahu akbar! and baying for Jewish blood, law enforcement in the British capital busied itself protecting the public from an old man who had the effrontery to say publicly that he doesn’t appreciate flags of a Jew-killing state popping up on his street.
This is Britain in 2023. No wonder people are looking for arks to climb aboard and sail away.
In the postgame analysis, people will probably criticize ARC for lacking focus and for the uneven quality of its speakers. It’s still not clear what ARC is for, and how its moving parts are meant to work together. They say the same thing about the nascent National Conservatism movement. That criticism is mostly fair, but naysayers should concede that the counterrevolution has to start somewhere. It’s easy to sit back and gripe about the failures of the political class and the various institutions within our society—business, media, academia, and so forth—but much harder to figure out what to do about it all.
We live in an era in which the spiritual energies of the West have been depleted, and the workability of classical liberalism has withered. (The two phenomena are connected, by the way.) Yet our imaginative horizon has been defined by liberalism for so long that it is extremely difficult to think beyond that framework. Similarly, most Christian churches and institutions are moribund, at a time when more than anything else, the West needs spiritual renewal. No successor faiths seem plausible. We live in the radically unstable condition that the late sociologist Zygmunt Bauman called “liquid modernity”: a period of extreme fluidity in which all things permanent dissolve, and nothing solid can form in its place before dissolving as well.
This flood cannot be escaped, only survived. This is why we must build arks: to carry us across the raging waters to dry land in the future.
If there is a second ARC, it ought to focus less on grand statements from the stage, and more on practical workshops with lobby people teaching the various skills needed to know how to build boats and launch flotillas—while there is still time.
Rod Dreher is an American journalist who writes about politics, culture, religion, and foreign affairs. He is author of a number of books, including the New York Times bestsellers The Benedict Option (2017) and Live Not By Lies (2020), both of which have been translated into over ten languages. He is director of the Network Project of the Danube Institute in Budapest, where he lives. Email him at [email protected].
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Building a Seaworthy ‘ARC’ Is Not So Easy
Woodcut of Noah’s Ark from Anton Koberger’s “Biblia Germanica” (1483), located at the University of Edinburgh.
It’s hard to come up with a less sexy title for a conference than ‘the Alliance For Responsible Citizenship,’ the name of the big London event going on this week, hosted by Jordan Peterson and other worthies. It is likely that the organizers came up with the idea of building an ‘ark,’ as in Noah’s apocalypse boat, and came up with a phrase to suit the acronym. Whatever. Recent history has made this meeting, which has gathered over 1,000 people from all over the world, a lot more ‘arky’ than could have been imagined.
Alas, the presentations from the stage have been hit and miss. Konstantin Kisin, the British-Russian comedian and co-host, electrified the room with a Tuesday morning speech exhorting the crowd to wake up and understand that they are tasked with nothing less than waging a war for Western civilization.
“We are in the fight of our lives,” he said.
It was the ideal speech for the moment. The same week, in the same city, British Muslims have been taking to the street in mass protests expressing solidarity with butchers of Israeli Jews. They have done the same thing in Europe and North America, and have been joined by unnerving numbers of leftist allies, particularly on university campuses. Kisin perfectly expressed the shock of the now.
At the opposite end was the opening day address excreted by ousted U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. It’s hard to overstate its cluelessness. McCarthy gibbered on offering repeated paeans to Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, both of whom left office over three decades ago. The Zombie Reaganaut decried that “individuals no longer believe in personal responsibility,” deployed a George W. Bush trope to denounce the “new Axis of Evil,” and lamented our collective weakness “in the face of authoritarians who despise our freedom.” He name-checked the “Shining City On A Hill,” and raised the aspirational standard of limited government. McCarthy even—I’m not making this up—took the opportunity to trash poor old Jimmy Carter.
This farrago of stale right-wing cliches by a man who was until a few weeks ago one of the two most senior Republican leaders in the nation was vivid testimony to why the GOP has been and is as useless as teats on a boar. I left the hall actually angry, reminded why I remain a conservative, but left the Republican Party in disgust back in 2008. Every conference-goer that I polled about the talk was viscerally appalled by its almost surreal disconnection with real-world conditions in 2023.
Political conservatism in the U.S. is led by unimaginative drones who have learned nothing from its failures in the past two decades or more, and by a clown who reflects the degraded vox populi, but who is as far from being the leader the crisis-ridden West needs now as Charlie Chaplin was from being Churchill. It was useful to get that learned, I guess.
There is an equal level of bilious cynicism among British conservatives here about the fecklessness of the Conservative Party. Said one to me as we stood on line to get in on the first day, “If things in this country have reached this appalling state under thirteen years of Conservative government, think how much worse it’s going to be when Labour get in.” I missed the Tuesday address by senior Tory politician Michael Gove, but one English wit said of it, “That wasn’t bad; it would be nice if he believed a word of it.”
Most of the speeches oscillated around a mediocre middle—about what you would expect from a conference built around the idea of “responsible citizenship.” The Catholic bishop Robert Barron’s address on morality and meaning was a notable exception. Bishop Barron might be the only cleric alive who can explain for a general audience what the medieval friar William of Ockham’s idea of nominalism has to do with our meaning crisis.
An Anglican churchman remarked to me, “If we just had one bishop like Robert Barron in the Church of England, things would be so much better.” To which I replied, “No doubt, but the problem with the Catholic Church is it has only one bishop like Robert Barron.”
Sir Paul Marshall, the wealthy British investor, delivered a rousing and substantive address denouncing the role capitalists have played in weakening our civilization, and calling for reform. This was the kind of thing people came to hear, and needed to hear. But later, the U.S. whiz kid presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy beamed in from the campaign trail to yammer on about corporate something or other. I exited for the lobby.
It turns out that the lobby, the spacious, well-lighted area where the delegates meet for coffee between and during sessions, is where the most important action at the ARC is happening. This is where people from around the world meet, talk, and build networks. It doesn’t sound very exciting, perhaps, but you should have been there to hear the conversations.
This is the kind of thing I’m talking about. A young French man based in Brussels approached me and told me that a prominent and socially-engaged investor is funding the construction of an intentional Catholic community in Normandy, inspired by my 2017 book The Benedict Option. I had no idea! I would like to go visit and write about this, I said, to give hope and ideas to others. The Frenchman offered to put us in touch.
We talked for maybe five minutes, but made a connection that could bear good fruit in helping to construct arks. Maybe not, but if not for what Jordan Peterson convened here in the London Docklands, most of us never would have met face to face. If nothing else, it is invigorating to talk with people from around the globe who see things more or less the same way you do. It makes you feel less alone—like you are part of a pilgrimage, not just a lonely tourist.
This solidarity is even more important than the ARC founders could have foreseen when they began planning the meeting many months ago. The pro-Hamas mass demonstrations happening throughout the West are shocks that still palpably reverberate among the people here. The Brits are especially hard hit. You couldn’t swing a dead cat in the lobby without hitting Britons prepared to talk about the prospect of migrating out of a country they fear is lost. If they doubted the UK’s future before October 7, the apocalyptic unveiling of vast numbers of pro-terror, antisemitic Muslims living among them has been the bitterest blackpill imaginable.
“I’m going to stay till the bitter end,” said one man, “but I don’t know if my children have a future in this country.” Two young Christian women who are engaged in conservative causes told me their circles are discussing the prospects of exiting the cities with their families and building Benedict Option communities in the countryside.
Others, knowing that I live in Budapest, inquire about the potential to emigrate to the country governed by Viktor Orban, whose warnings about mass migration—long despised by the great and the good throughout the West—are now being vindicated with horrific force. Said one English Christian woman, “Hungary is our Israel.”
She meant that Hungary—which, having relatively few Muslim immigrants, has been free of pro-Hamas demonstrations, and whose government is not ashamed to defend traditional Christian and Western values—is a place to which Christians can escape threats from domestic Muslims. It is also, she imagines, a place where one does not have to endure persecution from contemptible British institutions like London’s Metropolitan police. The coppers were captured on a viral video yesterday arresting an older working-class man who had filmed Palestinian flags festooning the streets of his neighborhood, criticized the flags, and posted that clip to his Facebook page.
Let me make the point clear. While pro-Hamas mobs clogged the busy Liverpool station and gathered outside the Prime Minister’s residence chanting Allahu akbar! and baying for Jewish blood, law enforcement in the British capital busied itself protecting the public from an old man who had the effrontery to say publicly that he doesn’t appreciate flags of a Jew-killing state popping up on his street.
This is Britain in 2023. No wonder people are looking for arks to climb aboard and sail away.
In the postgame analysis, people will probably criticize ARC for lacking focus and for the uneven quality of its speakers. It’s still not clear what ARC is for, and how its moving parts are meant to work together. They say the same thing about the nascent National Conservatism movement. That criticism is mostly fair, but naysayers should concede that the counterrevolution has to start somewhere. It’s easy to sit back and gripe about the failures of the political class and the various institutions within our society—business, media, academia, and so forth—but much harder to figure out what to do about it all.
We live in an era in which the spiritual energies of the West have been depleted, and the workability of classical liberalism has withered. (The two phenomena are connected, by the way.) Yet our imaginative horizon has been defined by liberalism for so long that it is extremely difficult to think beyond that framework. Similarly, most Christian churches and institutions are moribund, at a time when more than anything else, the West needs spiritual renewal. No successor faiths seem plausible. We live in the radically unstable condition that the late sociologist Zygmunt Bauman called “liquid modernity”: a period of extreme fluidity in which all things permanent dissolve, and nothing solid can form in its place before dissolving as well.
This flood cannot be escaped, only survived. This is why we must build arks: to carry us across the raging waters to dry land in the future.
If there is a second ARC, it ought to focus less on grand statements from the stage, and more on practical workshops with lobby people teaching the various skills needed to know how to build boats and launch flotillas—while there is still time.
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