Why ARC mattered

Midlife crises are underrated. What seemed to me as a younger man to be desperate attempts to top up the ever-leaking chalice of youth, or meaningless moonward howls for help, are in practice something much more mundane, and real, and profound. For they are a moment of literal crisis — judgment — when you measure the degree to which your journey towards forty has followed a course you are proud of, and test the degree to which the things you most value are in fact most valued by how you are living.

Such a period of judgment was the niggling backdrop to when I last attended the spectacularly large, and unassumingly named, Alliance for Responsible Citizenship Forum in November 2023. Two decades in academia had done a lot both to give me a sense of the scholarly tradition in which I worked, and also to disabuse me of any confidence that that tradition could endure without a fight. More importantly, though, ARC 23 allowed me to spend time with those who had shown the courage not just to confront the fact that life need not be lived on terms that embarrass you, but also to take the brave steps required to reorient and recalibrate their lives. Such encounters are arresting, galvanising and inspirational. They made clear to me how much the things I cared about most — family, community, faith, dignity, integrity, adventure — were being obstructed, both on and off campus.

At ARC 25, then, I felt like a private exhibit of sorts. For, given the scale and diffuseness of its ambitions, it’s all too easy to look at such an event — a gathering of thousands of people for several days at great cost and with great fanfare — and say, “Well, yes, good show, but what of it?” It is true that there is no single coherent set of actionable objectives, nor any formulation of concrete policy. But that is not how it works: its good is worked ultimately at the only level that can be held responsible for each and every life course: the individual. 

While ARC footage amply reveals the massive profile and charisma of its speakers, for many attendees the best moments come through small-scale conversations and serendipitous encounters. (The hardened Critic reader can join the dots here: little platoons, the Dunbar Number, the village pub, Chesterton, Oakeshott, Scruton, et al.)

Crucially, ARC does not claim to be inventing a new wheel. We are not in need of new ideas; we are not thirsting for a novel mode of communion; we don’t seek to break through into an as yet unknown world. That, of course, is the political tameness of conservatism: it looks forward, as any sound-thinking human does, by drawing its inspiration from the immutable past. It heralds no sweeping revolution that will inspire the wayward teenager or disenfranchised thirty-something and give them clear marching orders into the world. It is, by definition, unfashionable — of all moments and none.

A healthy society never thrives by its past alone; its self-confidence in the present is what builds trust for the future

And yet. This week hundreds of young men and women, from around the world, had taken the trouble to gather in the shadowlands of East London in the shared knowledge that things can be done better, and that they have a role in that. There was a palpable optimism about not just the future but also changes that are already emerging organically. After all, it’s not policy that will get us out of this mess; the state doesn’t know how to hand out happiness. 

A healthy society never thrives by its past alone; its self-confidence in the present is what builds trust for the future. That force — the very thing that allows communities to replicate and endure — is at a historically low ebb in the UK, and our abject, pathetic response to the Covid pandemic revealed how fragile some of the bonds and convictions that animate our body politic really are. Yet the British people sense intuitively that they are being held back, and that they deserve more of what they instinctively know they are missing.

The denuded state of our popular culture is visible in what we could call the Fourth Plinth Problem — that of being afraid, literally, to elevate on a platform that we all intuitively know to be beautiful. The ARC team know this all too well, so the architecture of ExCeL London was a surprise for such a gathering — but that reveals our broader problem of how hard it now is in Britain to surround 4,000 people with beauty. At least, in this case, dashes of orchestral music, splashes of art in the classical tradition, and flashes of sartorial elan added some humanity.

For better or worse, all is downstream from America, and the times there have a-changed. Whatever our institutions in the UK now strive to defend or impose, these broader cultural currents will soon wash over them. The only questions are when, and what thereafter. It is idle debating whether this phenomenon is right or wrong; the salient question is, what do you want to change when the wind does?

Rather than waiting and seeing, I chose to swim upstream to join an institution in the US that stands for the principles I believe in: studying the Humanities in the humanistic spirit; philological rigour; a commitment to transcendent ideals; genuine communion among scholars. And it is revealing of our moment that, earlier this month, Ralston College held an ARC-like “Renaissance and Renewal” seminar, where Douglas Murray, Jonathan Pageau, Gregg Hurwitz, Samuel Andreyev and others explored ways in which we can reinvigorate our shared culture – in academia, literature, music, art, architecture, and all else. Having been to several hundred seminars and conferences, I’m as shocked as I am proud to say it was the most striking summit I have witnessed. In particular, the stunning speech of a Ralston alumna about how her life had been transformed by the College held the room rapt. Change begins, and ends, with the individual.

So, to the question of what ARC does, I can only respond individually. The decisions I made were to teach and write in the conviction that it changes lives, to give my children a childhood whose experiences, challenges and adventures make it worthy of the name, to put books before screens and walks before work, to be honest about the greatest and truest pleasures of life, and to stop dallying for nothing. In recent years there has been so much time wasted, so much energy expended, and so much money squandered on things that simply don’t matter at all. Entering debates on terms that are ridiculous; circling unendingly in the grift economy of culture-war rhetoric; hammering inconsequential keys for ready release into the algorithmic echo chamber. 

Distraction, displacement, trivia, all of it. Except, that is, for three days spent in truly rewarding company, and for Britain’s most civilised magazine.