Postcards from London: ARC, Day 1

Adventures in reconstructing the West

A warm welcome to my new subscribers, with apologies to faithful readers who are wondering why this space has gone a bit quiet for a couple of weeks. I’m currently recovering from jetlag after getting the opportunity to attend the ARC (Alliance for Responsible Citizenship) conference in London. For those who don’t know what ARC is, it’s a lot to try to summarize. When someone asked me to describe it on a podcast, I said that I thought ARC wasn’t entirely sure what it wants to be. But broadly, I would say it’s pitching itself as the world’s largest networking point for people who want to reclaim a conservative, humanist-in-a-good-way vision for the West. Essentially, whatever Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum are doing, this conference wants to do and be the opposite. A noble goal, to be sure.

It’s not Christian in essence, but in practice, lots of Christians are involved. The other main architect alongside Jordan Peterson is Baroness Philippa Stroud. I wasn’t familiar with her before ARC, but she’s a Conservative Party peer and a powerful Christian voice in the UK think-tank scene. Wherever good things are happening involving Christians, conservatives, or Christian conservatives in the UK, chances are Baroness Stroud is probably involved somewhere behind the scenes. I didn’t get the chance to meet her, but she was a regular authoritative presence on stage, giving short rallying speeches and connecting one session to the next. This was her opening salvo. For a fun drinking game, take a sip of Earl Gray tea every time she makes a Lord of the Rings reference:

Christians made up a large chunk of the attendees as well. During a speech I didn’t attend, Arthur Brooks took a straw poll of how many audience members believed God created the world. Someone estimated that 3/4 of the crowd put their hands up. In general, the whole gathering had an almost revivalist flare. The speeches were delivered with an intensity that made them feel more like mini-sermons. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. And yet, the 4000 attendees hadn’t shelled out for tickets and hotel rooms just to hear a string of sermon-speeches they could stream on YouTube later. They came chiefly for the chance to meet each other.

Indeed, I encountered so many like-minded friends new and old that, like a lot of people, I ended up skipping most of the main show, which was held in a cavernous arena in the ExCeL convention center. The ExCeL is an impressively inhospitable piece of architecture, standing in silent aesthetic contrast to all the uplift about cultural renewal, cultural heritage, etc. But then I suppose such a building is the only modern solution to the problem of how to get 4000 people in one space at one time. The center is also located in an especially dismal part of the city, for which Douglas Murray apologized in his speech as he encouraged visitors to explore elsewhere.

Thankfully, I had time to do so before and after the conference, which I’ll save for some paid-reader exclusive content. This piece will be a free, free-wheeling collection of my Day 1 impressions (Days 2 and 3 to follow for paid readers). I didn’t attend the first incarnation of ARC, but many happy factors converged to make this an especially good year for me to see what all the fuss is about, including the generosity of people who defrayed my costs in various ways. Would my ticket have been worth it otherwise? I’m not sure, partly because I heard rumors (only rumors, I stress!) that the ticket prices kept coming down as the organizers sought to grow the attendee list. But for this year, it was a convenient excuse for me to make my first visit to a great city and meet some remarkable people.

My day began around 6 in the morning, giving me just enough time to wake up before taking the long-ish cab ride from my host house in Islington. I enjoyed one of several lovely chats with that most magnificent London archetype, the native London cabby. His name was Ian, and he was curious to know what the conference was about. When I said it was founded by Jordan Peterson, Ian confessed that “I do like a bit o’ Jordan Peterson.” He then asked me what I thought of “The Big D” — or he might have said “The Big T,” I forget, but either way it was quickly clarified that he was asking me for my thoughts on Donald Trump. I reflected mildly that he was certainly disruptive and unpredictable, and this has its pros and cons. “I will say,” Ian further confided, “he does make me laugh.” However, Ian wasn’t entirely uncritical. “If he could just not open his mouth and talk” sometimes, Ian mused, that would be a better MO for the Big D. “Count to ten first.”

We had all been told to arrive before peak hour for security. I was dropped off at the West entrance and made my epic trek towards the other side of the building, where I realized everyone was lined up to create a new peak hour. I dutifully allowed my purse to be checked, collected my lanyard (with a non-laminated paper nametag doomed to tear) and dropped off my coat with one of the young African women tirelessly collecting everyone’s outerwear. Thankfully, I saw a friendly face right away, so I wasn’t all alone in the massive coffee queue. I learned about a very dark recent turn in his life, and we proceeded to have an intense conversation about the problem of evil and hope through suffering that made all the surrounding buzz feel like so much background noise—a sobering reminder of what “the permanent things” really are.

As the line inched along, I encountered my first “ARC angel.” These hard-working young people were standing by to answer all our questions and wore semi-futuristic white jackets with the ARC logo in gold. (For all their helpfulness, the jackets gave them an unintentionally off-kilter appearance, as if we’d all stumbled into one of those sci-fi scenarios where everything’s going great, but something isn’t quite right.) It turned out that this particular ARC angel was a long-time reader of mine and wanted to express his appreciation. Several kind people messaged me on the conference’s app to say they appreciated my work and wanted to chat. The app proved essential for finding “your people” in the vast crowd. You searched through the whole list of attendees, filtered by occupation to make it slightly less tedious, and slowly built your collection of “contacts.” (You were then prompted to “rate” each “connection” for “usefulness,” which I found incredibly distasteful, but I’m told this is intrinsic to the design of these sorts of apps.)

Yet even with the app, I still missed people I would have wanted to meet and still failed to find a window to chat with everyone who wanted to connect. The place was that busy. The best way to try was to arrange a rendezvous at one of the “meeting places” in the exhibition hall—a labyrinth of booths, spontaneous podcasting sessions on white couches, and the occasional anti-communist art gallery. The signs saying “Meeting Place 1…2…3…4” on one side were graced with the names of various virtues on the other (Dignity, Love, etc.) Meeting Place 4 would become my people’s hangout all the way in the back, where you could find a table with coffee, tea, and—rarest and most precious thing of all—a water cooler.

I got separated from my friend in the arena, where I realized you could only sit at a table near the front if you or someone else had paid the money to have it “reserved.” Happily, I bumped into another friend who guided me to the best corner of the plebeian seats, where we could quietly riff on the first batch of speeches. A grating countdown buzzer blared through the place, and then an orchestra off to the side sounded a few patriotic notes to set the stage. One half expected Tom Cruise or Mel Gibson to come out waving an American flag. But it was just Jordan Peterson, sporting a disappointingly plain white suit and delivering a classic Petersonian mini-homily about responsibility, the fabric of society, sacrifice, and you know, stuff.

The conference speeches were arranged by theme throughout each day, with the first morning sessions focused on “our civilizational moment.” We began with a couple of stump speeches from Kemi Badenoch and a zooming-in Mike Johnson. I didn’t follow these particularly well at the time because I was tweeting, but someone aptly summed up Badenoch’s speech as “Real classical liberalism has never been tried,” which didn’t sit particularly well with attendees agitating for something with harder edges. Eventually, my own attention was well and truly caught by this panel featuring Os Guinness, the Coptic Orthodox Archbishop of London, and two other speakers I wasn’t familiar with (an African woman philanthropist and a German Catholic philosopher). The Archbishop was, as the kids say, dropping truth bombs left and right about the paradoxical power of Christianity under persecution, with a nod to the 10th anniversary of the murder of the 21 Libyan martyrs. The African philanthropist, Tsitsi Masiyiwa, was also enormously impressive. It would have been interesting to hear even more voices from the global South. Finally, Dr. Johannes Hartl capped things off by circling back to Peterson’s opening homily on sacrifice and gently clarifying the central message of the gospel, which is that God has sacrificed Himself.

Except for a later speech by Os Guinness, this was the biggest concentration of explicitly Christian content I got in the whole conference, and I wanted it to last for a lot longer than 20 minutes. With this and other panel discussions, it felt like the potential for a truly deep dive was a bit wasted in the rush to cram so many different speakers onto the stage.

Somewhere in here there was a musical break for the band Dirt Poor Robins, singing their tune “Irony,” which fell completely flat to my ear. The lyrics just don’t work as poetry, and they seem to be addressed to someone who won’t confront bad stuff he’s done, making it an exceedingly odd choice for a performance piece in this context. The conference struggled to find the right musical tone last year too, baffling everyone with a concluding performance of “Do You Hear the People Sing?” Perhaps they should quietly retire the idea of musical interludes altogether.

Wandering through the exhibit hall during the break, I walked right past Peterson himself getting ready to do an interview with Fox News. He had his eyes closed like he was meditating, oblivious to the people sneaking pictures of him as they walked by. I came to the delayed realization that I recognized the journalist interviewing him, a young British war correspondent named Benjamin Hall who lost a leg in Ukraine. Later, when I saw Benjamin alone, I made a shy approach and expressed my admiration, which he received most graciously. With a gesture in the direction of the main stage, he said, “Everything they’re saying in there is what I believe.” I could see what he meant, haphazard as my focus had been. In his own life and work, he embodied the best of the West. He was patriotic and driven. He wanted to see good things preserved. That’s what this conference was about.

At Meeting Place 4, I linked up with a pastor friend of mine who’s built a large video channel with commentary on figures like Jordan Peterson. He came fresh off an event in Ireland, along with the storyteller Martin Shaw (looking lovably out of place). As I walked around getting my bearings, a message popped up on my app from Bari Weiss’s sister inviting me to have a pitch chat upstairs in the Gold Room, wherever that was. I had to ask my way there, because it wasn’t common knowledge, and once I got there I realized why: This was where all the speakers were hiding, along with whoever had the money for the sort of ticket that officially lets you into the room where the speakers are hiding.

I had not bought such a ticket, so I felt like a bit of an interloper as I greeted Douglas Murray, chatted away with Suzy Weiss and a couple other journos, and ate the lunch that was right there for the munching, not at the end of a molasses-slow queue. At least I had my very own snazzy business card to hand out, courtesy of a talented designer back home. I quickly realized that exchanging contact details on the app couldn’t replace the tangible experience of putting a cool-looking card in someone’s hand. (In Suzy’s words, “OMG, THIS MOTHER***** CARD!”) Suzy was warm, energetic, and genuinely curious to learn more about my background as a Christian writer. We discussed potential ideas for Free Press articles, which may or may not come to fruition, but we’ll see. As we parted, she said she was interested in something about Mormons. “I’m not Mormon,” I noted. “Close enough!”

As I tried to make my way back down to the main level, I accidentally took a service elevator, which deposited me into one of those mildly nightmarish scenarios of endless stairs and doors that lead you anywhere but back inside the building. I eventually stumbled outside to find a few attendees smoking, and from there wandered back into the land of the living.

I spent the rest of the afternoon getting comfortable and chatting with like-minded people in the white couches of Meeting Place 4 (which were designed with nicely broad arms that could hold a coffee cup). You couldn’t entirely escape from the noise, which was being piped into a livestream area for people who wanted to watch without plunging back into the cavernous darkness. Friends complained that there should be something like a “Plebeian Gold Room” (a Bronze Room?) for ordinary attendees to withdraw and enjoy entirely quiet conversation. After the conference, I learned that a couple rooms like this had been reserved for mothers and children, certainly a higher priority.

While talking to a particularly well-connected acquaintance, I learned all sorts of gossipy backstage tidbits, including some stuff about the promised “Dark ARC” afterparty, which got nearly canceled and drew lots of buzz after the fact. This, I learned, was where all the edgier attendees were planning to go, some of whom thought the conference wasn’t nearly edgy enough. My acquaintance had met some of them, including a mysterious figure named Matthew Glamorre, who could be seen mingling about in funky glasses and a long blue cloak. If he looked like the sort of fellow who dabbled in occulty sorts of things, I was informed that’s because he does. I chose not to inquire further.

Soon it was time for the next mainstage session I wanted to catch, on “identity in a digital age.” First, Peter Thiel zoomed in for a rather awkwardly angled video chat with Jordan Peterson. In his very funny conference review, my friend Ben Sixsmith joked that he was disappointed Thiel didn’t zoom in from a basement dungeon surrounded by jars of congealed blood. Peterson floated a few of his rather jumbled ideas about Large Language Models and human learning, and Thiel in return ran through some of his usual beats. Thiel always sounds as if he has something up his sleeve, but it’s never quite clear what. The word “transhumanism” didn’t come up, but it hovered in the background as he talked about stagnation and failures to cure various diseases. (I’ve written before about how I actually see transhumanist and pro-euthanasia rhetoric as two sides of the same coin.) Mixed in there were some things I could get on board with about how Christianity uniquely grounds the answer to the “What is a human?” question, but Thiel’s particular read on Christianity is, to say the least, very off-beat.

Thiel also hit on one of my pet peeves with the suggestion that the problem of modern escapism from the tangible world is downstream of Descartes’s mind-body dualism. Though in fairness to Thiel, he’s far from the only pop historian of ideas to make Descartes a focal point of Where it All Went Wrong. Much of the followup panel with Peterson, Mary Harrington, and Jonathan Pageau was spent chasing that particular rabbit trail into the ground, which was unfortunate, since that discussion otherwise had a lot of potential. I also disagree with Harrington’s claim that the Scientific Revolution entailed doing away with telos or final cause, even though I very much share her robustly pro-human frame. Basically, as usual, I co-signed most everything the panelists wanted to say when they weren’t trying to do history of ideas. Watch here:

The editors of a British magazine I’ve written for had kindly invited me to a pub party that night, but I turned it down to attend my regional mixer, which was pitched as three hours of focused networking time over drinks and appetizers. I was excited about this and hoping to meet some people I’d missed so far. Unfortunately, it was quite underwhelming. The appetizers were the main saving grace—you ate these by rather awkwardly making your way around a circular buffet table until you’d sampled one of everything, by which time you’d had enough to make a meal of it. But when you weren’t stuffing your face, you were wandering around a room as big as a crowded basketball court in search of a familiar face, except with no place to sit down. To make it more irksome, there was a stage up front where speakers began dipping in and out to interrupt the flow of our conversations. Fortunately, by that time I was far enough in the back that I could ignore this while talking with a shy pair of nerdy stop-motion animation artists from California. They left me with a parting gift—a pack of dental floss advertising their forthcoming stop-motion adaptation of The Princess and the Goblin (in a little stroke of graphic design genius, the Princess’s thread turns into the dental floss).

Wandering down the hall outside these inhospitable rooms, I ran into Eric Weinstein holding forth with a small knot of friends and admirers. Eric, to his great credit, was one of the only big speakers who regularly left the cocoon of the Gold Room and actively mingled with regular attendees. I tuned in just as he was talking about his Twitter dustup with Ashley St. Clair, aka Elon Musks’s latest baby mama. Fortunately the conversation took a more pleasant turn into music, specifically Broadway musicals. Eric maintained that the true musical ended with My Fair Lady. Meanwhile, a businessman in the group said he could take any random sentence and turn it into an Andrew Lloyd Webber song. Eric tried him with “Vivek Ramaswamy falls in love with his vacuum cleaner.” The businessman did not disappoint.

I quickly ran out of steam and spent some time getting lost between the great mixing halls and the bathrooms (which were in an icy cold pocket of the building cut off by glass doors—two intrepid people were manning a little table there, bundled up in coats). I bumped into Martin Shaw again, also wandering around in confusion. “It’s so disorienting,” he said in his mild way. Fortunately, we got unlost together. I stumbled back into the mixing room mad with thirst, but there was no water to be found. I resolved to be more foresighted in this department tomorrow.

And so concluded my first day of the ARC conference. For more postcards from London, stay tuned!