An imposter at ARC

To ARC! It’s the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, and I aspire to be responsible and a citizen. When I enter the auditorium, Jordan Peterson is talking about the importance of sacrifice. As someone who woke up at 2am to be there, I couldn’t agree more. “And that’s the thing about the postmodernists,” says Peterson, clutching his brow. I leave for coffee. 

ARC aspires to renew the cultural and political promise of the West. ExCel London is a mildly odd location. Walking through its vast interior feels like being trapped for eternity inside an endless shopping mall. Outside the auditorium are nice displays of books and art. The effect is somewhat diminished by the fact that they are in a room that looks like an aircraft hangar. Still, it must be difficult to find attractive locations that could fit 4000 people.

It is good to see familiar faces. To some extent, a conference is just a grand excuse for catching up with people — and, of course, a means of meeting new people. But the organisers have big hopes. They want the conference to help us to “re-lay the foundations of our civilisation”.

London certainly offers cause to feel gloomy about its current state. No, it’s not the nightmare that some American conservatives imagine it to be, with knife fights breaking out on every street corner. But there is a sense of slow and miserable decline. A tube carriage contains adverts for egg freezing and infertility treatments. Flats are being advertised at prices that would bankrupt a small South Asian state. A 13-year-old has been arrested for stabbing a fellow teen.

To inspire us, ARC has brought a sense of American optimism. I have never felt so close to the United States. The stalls have the vibe of a business expo while the speeches are tinged with Evangelicalism. We are being exhorted to get out and save the world — and to take a free informational leaflet.

This might sound patronising, but perhaps we could use some American dynamism. I may scoff when a speaker’s bold announcement that babies are good inspires thunderous applause but I suspect this sort of sentiment would go a longer way towards inspiring a pro-natal culture than a long, pen-sucking meditation on, say, “Edmund Burke, Roger Scruton and the Conservative Case for the Family”. The tears of the chair of the Munich Security Conference have barely dried since JD Vance had the monstrous and terrifying audacity to tell Europe’s leader that free speech is good and mass migration has its downsides, and some American plain-speaking might be welcome. I just wish it came with more of a sense of humour.

Kemi Badenoch is here to tell us that “civilisation is in crisis”. “It’s not liberal values that are the problem,” she says, “It’s weakness”. Where did that weakness come from then? Ah, never mind.

“Let’s remember what we are defending here,” she says, “Not just our wealth but our culture — a culture built on … classic liberal values.” Look, I’m all for free speech and free markets, but young men didn’t fight for “values” in World War Two — they fought for Britain (or France, or Poland et cetera), and Britain had a long, rich heritage before John Stuart Mill was a twinkle in his father’s eye. Civilised societies are not only built on “values” or they would be interchangeable. They are also built on a specific sense of home.

“The Conservative Party in Britain has just lost an election,” Mrs Badenoch goes on, “[But] take a look at President Trump. He’s shown that sometimes you need that first stint in government to spot the problems. But it’s the second time around when you know how to fix them.” This seems to obscure the fact that the Conservatives’ “stint” lasted fourteen years compared to Trump’s four, and that they were themselves the cause of a lot of those “problems”. 

In fairness, Badenoch’s speech picked up towards the end when she stopped talking about “values” and got more blunt. Europe needs less migration and more innovation or it’s screwed. Well — yes. For all the value of high-minded cultural reflection, there’s no need to overcomplicate things.

In truth, the conference makes me feel like a bit of a fraud

Peter Thiel comes beaming in from the United States to talk about AI. It’s disappointing that he’s speaking from a sunny living room and not a dark underground lair full of jars of organic blood. His interview with Jordan Peterson is short but interesting. We have to embrace AI, he says, for all its risks, because doing otherwise means being trapped in the “Groundhog Day” of contemporary stagnation. Will it not make human beings increasingly redundant if we outsource a lot of our creative and intellectual work? Perhaps, says Thiel, so perhaps we need Christianity as a reminder of man’s inherent worth. It’s a nice thought — though if Christianity is true (and its truth is surely the important question) it does not exist to make us feel good about ourselves.

I find myself drifting from stall to stall. A lot of the grand civilisational rhetoric seems pretentious to me, but perhaps my cynicism is masking embarrassment. In truth, the conference makes me feel like a bit of a fraud. Instead of talking about ideals, I gossip about peers. In my bag is a book of Frank Kermode essays about authors I have never bothered to read first hand. I find myself looking at the people who are working at the conference — clearing plates, serving coffees and checking bags. Between the opinion columnist doodling in his notebook and the barista doing his best to earn an honest wage, who is the more responsible citizen?

In the evening, I go out into London and get aggressively drunk. The next day, my stomach churns and my mouth feels like a landfill. I look at myself in the mirror. Perhaps Jordan Peterson was right at the beginning of his fame. Re-laying the foundations of civilisation starts at home.