ARC’s Second Coming

Important thinkers were missing but the tilt was towards Christianity

A year ago when ARC, the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, first stepped onto the global stage, I thought this utterly uninspiring handle was surely spawned in the brain of a bureaucrat. To me, the whole enterprise lacked Energy. And the focus was weak. They seemed to think that the Stories we were telling were the wrong ones. This year they think that The Choices we’re making are the wrong ones. This year it became evident that a refurnished Christianity would save us from ourselves. I have no objection to that. But it seems to me that the Angst that is so pervasive in the West has deeper roots worth examining. Namely who shall rule AI and in what manner. Whether or not we’re all getting hooked up to our intelligent machines, indeed, what our relationship to our advanced Language Models ought to be. Only Michael Shellenberger addressed it directly by asking if the Real Problem wasn’t a lack of moral wisdom to run AI, not a lack of Intelligence per se. That what we are suffering from is too much of a certain kind of Intelligence without clear moral guidance. Yes, exactly. They might have asked if unleashing Musk brandishing a huge phallic chainsaw on the out of control Washington Bureaucratic Blob was in need of moral direction. The Bible has few guidelines for a situation like this. But there are some books that everyone who thinks about these things ought to at least know about.

I am referring to Dr Ian McGilchrist, whose groundbreaking book, The Master and his Emissary foresaw and analyzed the conundrums defeating us today. A few words by this eminent scientist/philosopher/poet would have shifted and sorted the entire evening towards actual new ideas and ways of thinking about the poorly defined Revolution we’re suffering through. Dr McGilchrist developed a theory about how humans operate when they use their left or their right brain, both of which are essential to human flourishing. It is when the left brain, the one where words, concepts, stored knowledge and the will to control resides, stops paying attention to the right brain where love, art, context and imagination as well as morality and faith live, that you get a society in trouble. He predicted and described this society it in 2009 with the already mentioned book, the pivotal text of our time that belonged at this conference if nothing else did.

Where was Peter Thiel who has admitted that what haunts him is the fear of a digital dictatorship? Thiel should know because he invented the means to do just that, with companies like Palantir. This company was even allowed to have its spokesman at ARC but without offering anything noteworthy. Where was Thiel’s inspiration, the bizarre off centre British iconoclast calling himself Mencius Moldbug, aka Curtis Yarwin. He is decidedly not Christian but that is all the more reason to invite him to defend himself amongst his detractors.

Instead we got people like David Brooks. What?

Here are some highlights and lowlights.

What, you might ask, is a card carrying member of the Elitist Left who has been writing for the NYT since his twenties, doing at a Christian and Christian adjacent meeting where most of the speakers and the audience people who would rather die than read the New York Times? He was there because he has sniffed out the vibe shift towards Christianity and has had a very public and recent conversion. And because he is now a newly minted Christian, he is apparently one of the Good Guys. The audience got a surprise when Brooks told everyone how terribly sorry and ashamed he was to belong to an intellectual elite that only exists because they invented something called a ‘meritocracy’ and thus created inequality in the land! He came from a family of privilege and was ashamed. He went on in this vein until someone in the audience finally got it and yelled Traitor, from the back. Unruffled, Brooks droned on, but perhaps a few in the audience woke up and asked themselves why they were listening to someone who is a master of riding the vibe shifts in our culture. He is if nothing else a public intellectual who makes his living speaking and writing. Maybe he was just trying to keep his job prospects fresh? Jordan, what were you thinking?

Speaking of Jordan Peterson whose brainchild ARC is; he opened the conference looking rather like an elegant, latter day Martyr in a white pin stripe and exhorting us all to remember that no society survives without Sacrifice. I suspect I wasn’t alone in finding it hard to watch him deliver his thoughts with his eyes wide shut. But he is, as he now admits, ‘a new kind of Christian’, so he does represent one of the fundamental drivers of western culture, something I’ll get back to shortly. In a lighter vein, Konstantin Kisin, looking more polished and even funnier than last year, did not disappoint with a slightly over the top impersonation of the German Minister Pistorius responding to Vance, fuming Ziss iss not acceptable! How dare the USA call out homegrown fascist laws suppressing free speech in Germany. The audience was a bit shocked; they are after all, part of the class that Kisin was making fun of. Unfortunately, laughter isn’t what this meeting of minds was about. It was rather a kind of last ditch attempt to save us from internal dissension, despair and ultimate collapse. Surely a tall order. But I applaud them for giving it a go. Even if they didn’t solve the issues plaguing us, at least we now see them more clearly. Several people weighed in on what is supposed to be the most catastrophic problem we face, Climate Change.

There was Sir Paul Marshall making a coherent case against one the favourite delusions of the Greens and the Far Left: Net Zero, currently ruining the economy of Britain and Germany. To put it plainly, wind and sun are no substitute for oil and gas unless you’re okay with a crashing economy and freezing in the dark. The green technology that can replace fossil fuels has yet to be invented, he pointed out. Meanwhile, the only way to end world poverty and grow our own economies is to use ever more Energy. A serious conundrum. Bjorn Lomberg, who is too old to walk on stage in nothing but an old Tee-shirt and jeans but did so anyway, made an impassioned and well-founded case against climate catastrophizing, something that is costing the West its economy, no less.

Perhaps the most sobering and timely talk was by the historian Niall Ferguson, who introduced us to the concept of guaranteed national decline whenever a nation’s debt payments outpace those of defence. This is a phenomenon discovered by another Scotsman and it has proven to be true. Unfortunately, last year the US reached that milestone, spending more on debt servicing than its defence budget, which is gigantic. That, to my mind, explains the chainsaw that Trump has unleashed on the Waste and Corruption of the Washington Blob. And his weird attempts to annex large nations full of minerals, like Canada and Greenland. He needs to bring down that debt, he needs to fix the economy, and he’s determined to do it any way he can. In fact, his disenchantment with the war in Ukraine may have nothing to do with justice or peace and more to do with stopping the money drain. This is not a power game; it is a game of survival.

Apart from rude political power, there is the power of the human mind and how it works, sometimes to our detriment. If you may recall, I already mentioned Dr McGilchrist who lucidly described the out of control, left brain dominant society that is now overreaching itself with AI. Which is why the ARC is in fact necessary, if sometimes missing the mark. The entire enterprise of the ARC, that of saving western civilization by writing better stories and making better choices, came about precisely because Dr McGilchrist’s theory has been proven correct in every domain. Shellenberger’s talk would have benefited immensely had he read McGilchrist or better yet, met him at the conference.

McGilchrist’s analysis is not so different from Jordan Peterson’s insofar as he too believes that without giving a role to the Transcendent, humans make terrible mistakes. As Bishop Barron described it in his short and clear address, the Energy (again) that ought to be directed outward and upward towards God or the Transcendent becomes destructive if it is directed towards entirely human enterprises.

“Whenever we make something absolute, our culture falls in on itself” he observed. Yes, and absolutism breeds extremism that breeds all the other nefarious isms like Fascism and Communism, false gods all of them. Being a Bishop, Barron of course thinks that the answer lies in faith in The Christian God. Peterson and even Ayaan Hirsi Alli agree, she echoed his thinking about extremism by noting that all those people who were against nationalism had ‘failed to make a distinction between good and bad nationalism’ and that we must ‘stop the post nationalism experiment; it has gone too far’. Yes, of course it has what with porous borders letting in drugs, cartels and anyone and everyone.

I want to talk a bit more about this exhortation to rediscover God in our lives if we want our society to flourish. I’m in absolute favour of that idea. The trouble is, I cannot for the life of me imagine myself in a Christian Church praying to a Christian God. Commanding myself to believe is futile. Faith, like Love, is not under my control. It is an Energy that operates under its own laws, not ours. Most of us know this from personal experience. And surely the audience at ARC also found itself wondering how to suddenly become a person of Faith just because it seems like a good idea. Alas, ARC did not provide a framework for us, the lapsed believers who cannot just fake it ‘til they make it.

But hold on: For us, those who are not agnostic but for whom a return to the bosom of the Church is not possible, there are other paths. McGilchrist calls himself a ‘Panentheist’, which is different from a Pantheist. Others try Buddhism and meditation. Still others become obsessive creatives, serving their Muse. As for me, I harbour a kind of mystical belief that humanity is part of the vast cosmic creative Energy that continues to unfold and will continue to do so long after we are gone, and a less troubled and troublesome species emerges on this planet. I believe there are other realms and other species on other worlds. We are not alone. We never were. We are part of the cosmic Energy, that some of us call God. We never die, we only transubstantiate. None of these beliefs make me a Christian, pace Jordan Peterson. You may be a new kind of Christian, and I respect you for that. As a Culture, we cannot dismiss it and should not. However, this is a road I cannot follow. All I can do is wave at you from the path I am on. They are not, perhaps, that far apart and in the end, none of us know for certain what we are and why we are here on this, our beautiful, beleaguered Planet Earth

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