I had been hearing whispers about the hotly anticipated ARC conference for some time before, to my great surprise, my own golden ticket arrived. The excitement upon opening it up is where the similarity with Charlie Bucket ended because ARC is offering something diametrically opposed to the instant gratification and self-indulgence of the chocolate factory. The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship is an international community with a vision for a better world where every citizen can prosper, contribute and flourish. These citizens from around the world recognise that our societies are at a turning point and that the time to develop a better story is now.
I arrived at Magazine London to join the back of an already long queue of inspirational people personally invited in recognition for the courageous leadership that they have shown in the various fields from which they came.
Everything had been meticulously planned, thoughtfully prepared and had a sense of high quality about it. There was a rarely heard authenticity behind Philippa Stroud’s opening remarks, “Truth” she said, “does exist and can be found”. This simple recognition of truth grounds the whole project.
Themes started to emerge throughout the first day; responsibility, family, self-sacrifice, freedom, hope. Jordan Peterson (pictured) spoke of the importance of courage and responsibility “we need to tilt the world up” he said, before adding “and we do that within the confines of our own life first”. This, for all the Catholics in the room, of which there were many, had echoes of St Josemaria Escriva, the founder of Opus Dei who developed a spirituality directed towards the sanctity of every man and woman with a belief that each of us can, by God’s grace, achieve holiness through the course of our ordinary work and life if we strive towards it.
Miriam Cates was not the only person to mourn the breakdown of the family and point to its necessity as the building block of a healthy society. Fraser Nelson and Jonathan Haidt discussed the problems facing young people who are no longer rooted in families and communities but have instead grown up in “networks”. Haidt pointed to the dramatic increase in mental health problems, suicide and drug use (one in seven adults take antidepressants) that demonstrably disproportionately affect the offspring (especially girls) of secular liberal parents. Children who have not been given a smartphone and who are engaged in their family and religious communities are less susceptible to the damaging effects of the artificial world that has been babysitting many since infancy. Haidt offered some useful advice to those parents who recognise that smartphone use is not good for their child, but who feel that they have to furnish them with one for fear of them being excluded. He called this the “collective action problem”, when any one person doing the right thing is in big trouble. He suggested that parents look at the literature on how to solve the collective action problem as a way to manage this. In short: don’t give your kids a phone.
Michael Shellenberger, author of Apocalypse Never, addressed the issue of energy resources, highlighting the incoherence of the environmental movement which has become a pseudo-religion with its own priestly cast of scientists and a whole new set of witches to burn at the stake for their heretical views. This pseudo religion emerged so intensely in the west amongst people who have lost sight of making themselves right by God, and so (because the religious instinct is inevitable), try to make themselves right by nature.
There is a passage in Kings 19:11 which describes Elijah waiting for the spirit of God to pass by. He is instructed to go and stand on the mountain whereupon he experiences a wind so great that it shatters the rocks and tears the mountains apart. But the lord is not in the wind. After the wind, comes an earthquake, and the lord is not in the earthquake, nor the raging fire that comes after it. Then comes a gentle whisper, and it is in this gentleness that Elijah finds himself in the presence of the lord. In a noisy angry world which preaches shame, in which monuments are torn down and in which people are led to believe that they are parasites on the earth, there was most definitely a sense that God was moving in the gentle and hopeful whispers of those calling for a better story for our descendants; one grounded in a transcendent vision for the human person, one in which freedom is recognised as the power to do what is right and not simply to do what one can, one that examines the things that we have begun to take for granted and asks “On what do our human rights rest? On what basis has my neighbour got any worth at all?”
Leaving the auditorium on day one with a renewed sense of hope, and a wonderful new notebook and pen, I decided to skip the evening drinks reception, with its opportunity to mix with some very important people and get home to the most important people I know, my family. When I walked into the house, feet sore from a day in heels, head buzzing with information, my teenage, phone free, God fearing daughter gave me a big hug and said “I’m so happy you’re home”. This is the beginning of the better pro-human story.
(Photo by Adam Jacobs – Peterson Lecture)
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