Calling Western Civilization to Its Senses
by John Duggan, First Things:
The venue for the inaugural conference of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, held Oct. 30–Nov. 1 in London, was emphatically not what I was expecting. ARC was established earlier this year as an international community of leaders and thinkers—most of them on the right—with the intention of calling Western civilization to its senses. It wants to return for inspiration to the West’s deepest, most venerable sources; rejects the inevitability of decline; and seeks solutions that draw on humanity’s highest virtues and bottomless ingenuity. ARC’s founders include Jordan Peterson and Sir Paul Marshall, a hedge fund manager who backed Brexit and bankrolled the creation of the website UnHerd.
Yet here we were, not in some great hall redolent of the best of the West, but in a low-slung, metallic warehouse of deep, near unrelieved grayness, approached across long stretches of asphalt in post-industrial east London. The conference opened with a live performance of Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man” and a promotional video crammed with golden-toned images of civilizational glories, both of them as opposed, aesthetically speaking, to the surroundings we found ourselves in as it was possible to be. If we had such things as factories for the ailments that afflict the modern psyche—rootlessness, atomization, anomie—they would surely look a lot like this place.
The speeches came in torrents. Paul Marshall laid waste, in short order, to monopoly capitalism, crony capitalism, and woke capitalism. Jonathan Haidt, Erica Komisar, and Warren Farrell, author of The Boy Crisis, itemized the ways in which childrearing in the West had gone wrong and the possible corrections. French financier Charles Gave branded central bankers as a bunch of useless and terrifying criminals. Magatte Wade argued that fully liberated African entrepreneurship would change the continent’s future. Ayaan Hirsi Ali provided instructions for the “seed packets” of Western civilization: “grow them, nurture them, water them, and, when they are attacked, fight for them.”
[…] ARC’s relationship with Christianity, meanwhile, feels like a work in progress, but a potentially meaningful one. (I spotted over a dozen men in clerical garb milling around the conference floor.) The lavish promo video called up ancient beauties of Catholic art to make its case, and many speakers leaned on the great transcendentals of goodness, truth, and beauty to structure their arguments. In her opening remarks, ARC CEO Philippa Stroud lost little time in invoking the imago dei as a cornerstone of the Alliance’s worldview. “We need a better story” was the conference catch-cry; and, of course, in large part, Western civilization grew out of the telling and retelling (in word, in paint, in stone, in music, in drama) of the Christian story and its countless offshoots; the story of creation, fall, incarnation, justice, mercy, death, resurrection, redemption—a story imbued with the kind of teleology of which the modern mind, ARC would contend, is bereft.
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