All Aboard the Arc

 

I recently investigated the website of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) who held a conference in London in October with a list of ‘dissident’ speakers - of both Left and Right persuasion – that included Jordan B. Peterson, the historian Niall Ferguson, Former Prime Minister of Australia John Howard and current Tory MP Miriam Cates. Framing itself more as an odd-ball think-tank than a party or lobbying organisation they include on their website a collection of questions which readers are invited to respond to and send to the organisation. ARC, as the acronym suggests are about renewal, presumably against a backdrop of cataclysm or eschatological fervour. But they also quote Martin Luther King, Jr's bon mot “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice”; which evokes the long durée of historical progressivism. In short, like so many of these Right leaning conventicles they are a confused mishmash of influences and styles. Nevertheless, most of the questions here assume concepts and forms of thought drawn from garden-variety (or perhaps late 19th century variety) Liberal democratic and free-market orthodoxy. More on account of boredom than serious engagement, I set about in full doomer mode to respond to their questions.

 

Can we find a unifying story that will guide us as we make our way forward?

A story that unifies a nation or community can only come from out of that community's specific historical circumstances. As such, it could never serve as a universalist mythologeme to "humanity" or other such abstraction. Local stories and myths have been the foundation of every historical community until Christianity assimilated them or swept them away, only for its own stories to be superseded by the universalism of progress and global capitalism, neither of which preserve the specificity or spirit that grounds a living people. Only the overthrow of globalist universalism can open the way to new myths and new foundations. We need a multitude of myths not a monocultural mythology.

 

How do we facilitate the development of a responsible and educated citizenry?

One can never be responsible to an abstraction, so, in order to foster a responsible citizenry we must first nurture communities that bind their members through an autochthonous loyalty, that is a loyalty born from out of the everyday social relations specific to a historical community. No one feels responsible in a mass society governed by empty formal values such as those proffered by Liberalism. The hyper-individualism of our present day is incompatible with a demand for substantive social obligations beyond those demanded by the law. If the law could be remade to instantiate a leading culture of substantive values, and those values imbedded in institutions then perhaps we could talk about specific responsibilities. As things stand it is perhaps true that the renewal of responsibility may only come through the cooperation required for preservation of self and kin in the event of a general collapse. Thus, pampered Western complacency must end.

 

What is the proper role for the family, the community, and the nation in creating the conditions for prosperity?

These things have been rendered defunct by contemporary financial and technological global capitalism. Family, community and nation are all social formations that set limits by including some excluding others. Such delimiting is opposed to the liquifying effects of global Capital which seeks to break down barriers to its self-expansion, rendering all persons fungible within a world-market for goods, services and cultural ephemera (delivered in a digital first economy). Now, the old-world formations of family and nation can only be defensive, a bolt-hole to wait out the collapse of the global so that a new and modest idea of prosperity might arise. As Hannah Arendt once said, "I do not love the world, I love my friends". This is a statement of limits and a good start.

 

How do we govern our corporate, social and political organizations so that we promote free exchange and abundance while protecting ourselves against the ever-present danger of cronyism and corruption?

Cronyism and corruption are a natural outgrowth of any organisation once it becomes disembedded from its local role and turns global. Most institutions, whether political, corporate or social have become totally marketised over the previous few decades such that they all work with a similar set of concepts that have nothing to do with any autochthonous community or identifiable set of values beyond profit, loss and market share. It is foolish to imagine any other values could arise while the present set of social relations prevail.

 

How do we provide the energy and other resources upon which all economies depend in a manner that is inexpensive, reliable, safe and efficient, including in the developing world?

There is no technological solution to the problems of energy and resources. The club of Rome report in 1972 which identified limits to growth is still the most clear sighted and straightforward statement of a basic fact. As long as human beings conceive of themselves as separate from their environment, and as long as they harbour the desire to obtain the God-like power to transcend environmental limitations, we will continue on this path to destruction. It is perfectly possible that human beings are marked above all else by hubris and that collective self-destruction is our natural fate. But small pockets of human life may survive and be able to start again. Build back from out of ruins.

 

How should we take the responsibility of environmental stewardship seriously?

It is difficult to take it seriously since it ascribes to us a collective power that is only an illusion. We did not collectively reason our way into climate collapse and we cannot collectively reason our way out of it. Industrialisation and the mass exploitation of the earth's recourses was a process that took centuries and was never planned out on a global scale. The claim that global humanity can manage its way out of its own fate is nothing but hubris and mass delusion. Only small communities, beginning with the family can begin to withdraw and prepare for the cataclysm.