The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) conference in London entered its second day with the organizers once again showing their talent for defying expectations. In the morning, every seat held a copy of The Age of Reconstruction by Johnny Patterson, the foundational work for this year’s gathering.
Patterson is one of the central but less publicly known figures behind ARC. He is the organization’s chief ideas officer and one of the people shaping its intellectual direction. In the foreword to the volume, the conference’s co-founder Philippa Stroud recalls a holiday that took her and her husband to Athens, to the roots of our culture. It was an act of remembrance and a return to the sources of our civilization.
A video at the start of the session brought participants to the conference’s guiding idea from an unexpected angle, with rapid cuts and hard beats. What must we forget so that we can revive our culture? The short film left viewers to answer that question for themselves.
Michael Shellenberger opened the series of speakers on the panel Our Civilisation Story.
A Change Born of Thought
Shellenberger is one of the most prominent figures in today’s Western debate over culture. Unlike many of his present-day allies, he does not come from a conservative milieu. His political formation took place in progressive California. He was involved in environmental causes, supported Democratic positions and was regarded as a proponent of technocratic optimism about progress.
That makes his present critique especially interesting. It also lends it a particular authenticity, because it grew out of a life and a line of thought that eventually led him against the mainstream.
Michael Shellenberger is an investigative journalist, bestselling author and founder of the publishing platform Public, where he writes about free speech, censorship, energy policy, homelessness, drug policy and cultural change. The great struggles of our time, according to Shellenberger, are not primarily economic or geopolitical, but civilizational.
The decisive question is not which party wins the next election, but whether Western societies still have enough confidence in their own institutions, traditions and achievements. Shellenberger named the rule of law, public order, national solidarity, meritocracy, equality before the law, the protection of children, industrial development, freedom of speech and faith in progress. These elements are not accidental historical phenomena, he said, but prerequisites for freedom, prosperity and social cohesion.
What the West Must Forget
For Shellenberger, what must be cast aside is identity politics, wokeness, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs and progressive cultural policy. He identifies them as forces that increasingly tell Western history as a story of oppression, discrimination and the abuse of power.
The positive achievements of Western societies, namely the rule of law, scientific progress, democracy and individual freedom, are pushed ever further into the background. The result is a culture of self-accusation that robs people of confidence in their own civilizational foundations.
Another central thought in Shellenberger’s remarks concerned the role of religion and the search for meaning. Scientifically and technologically, the West has become ever more successful. At the same time, many traditional sources of moral orientation have been lost.
Where religious convictions once gave answers to questions of suffering, guilt and injustice, politics now produces replacement religions. They promise redemption through social transformation and, in some cases, take on dogmatic forms.
Rediscovering Religion
The discussion between Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Rod Dreher and Johannes Hartl followed seamlessly from that thought. James Orr, professor of the philosophy of religion, moderated the panel. Hirsi Ali opened with the idea that the future of the West is decided first not in parliaments or ministries, but in the minds and hearts of the young generation.
Hirsi Ali was born in Mogadishu, Somalia, and is a Somali-Dutch-American author and human rights activist. After a long period as an atheist, she announced her conversion to Christianity in 2023, explaining the decision by her conviction that Western civilization cannot preserve its cultural and moral foundations without its Christian inheritance.
She sees the West today in a situation in which its intellectual and moral foundations have been weakened. Cultural renewal, she argued, must begin with the education and formation of the next generation.
The Disenchantment of the World
Rod Dreher, an American writer on religion, politics and culture, does not see the crisis of the West as the result of political misjudgments or cultural conflicts. He speaks of a loss of enchantment, an emptying of the world of meaning and transcendence. Modern society has gained power over nature, but in doing so has lost its sense of the sacred.
Dreher is especially critical of the digital world. Social media, virtual realities and, increasingly, artificial intelligence threaten to replace direct experience of reality. Against that, he calls for a return to the formative realms that have shaped human beings for centuries: art, music, literature, nature, religion and personal encounter. These are not nostalgic refuges, but necessary conditions for a healthy culture.
Johannes Hartl, a German philosopher, Catholic theologian and founder of the House of Prayer in Augsburg, stressed that cultural developments always emerge from deeper spiritual sources. He sees many of today’s problems as rooted in the loss of a transcendent orientation. The eye, Hartl said, was not made to look at itself, but to perceive the light. In the same way, man was not made to revolve constantly around himself.
For Hartl, a return to God is therefore not a private question of faith, but a cultural necessity. Among many young people, he sees a growing disappointment with the promises of radical individualism. Out of that disappointment, a new openness to spirituality and religious traditions is emerging.
Despite a diagnosis that was at times bleak, all three panelists made clear that optimism remains warranted. They agreed that there are signs of a cultural counter-movement. Rod Dreher pointed, for example, to the growing number of young people taking part in traditional pilgrimages, including the famous route to Chartres in France.
Farage and the Defense of the West
The conversation between Philippa Stroud and Nigel Farage was a highlight of that part of the program. Farage has been one of the defining political figures in the UK for more than three decades. As a co-founder of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), he was a driving force behind Brexit. As the current leader of Reform UK, he is seeking to exert lasting influence over Britain’s political debate.
For Farage, Western civilization must be defended without hesitation. It is the most successful social order humanity has produced, he said. It rests on Christian culture, democracy, the rule of law and the peaceful election and removal of political leaders. Many political elites, he argued, have lost awareness of those achievements.
After Brexit, Farage withdrew from politics. He returned because he saw: “The values had been lost. Family, community, country. And that's why I came back.” In his view, the decline of the family and the loss of community are closely connected. The state cannot simply reverse this process, but it must once again make a robust case for the importance of stable families and local ties.
Farage is a sharp critic of British energy policy. High energy prices, he argued, are the central cause of the weakness of Britain’s industrial base. Net Zero policy and the fixation on renewable energy have cost Britain competitiveness. His alternative model consists of using nuclear energy and achieving the greatest possible degree of energy independence.
High immigration, the Reform UK leader said, has had both economic and cultural consequences. It has slowed productivity growth and weakened social cohesion. He criticized a politics that increasingly treats people according to group identities rather than as individuals.
All citizens, he argued, must be treated equally regardless of origin or religion. Growing antisemitism in Europe, he added, was a source of concern.
Political elites, in his view, have recoiled from Islamist extremism for too long: “The entire establishment has run away from radical Islam. We are not even trying.” Britain and the West, Farage argued, are confronted not only with economic or institutional problems, but above all with a crisis of cultural identity.
His answer is a return to family, community, national belonging, economic independence and a confident commitment to the historical foundations of Western civilization.
The Reconstruction Begins
At this point, Shellenberger’s appeal, the cultural and religious arguments of Hirsi Ali, Dreher and Hartl, and the practical politics of Farage converge. The issue is not merely a return to classic liberal principles of equal rights for all citizens. It is about understanding again where our culture is rooted and which principles grow from those roots.
What we must learn to forget is the dark mirror of our culture that overshadows the present age. We must recover faith in God, the recognition that the family is the core of our society and the understanding that society rests on freedom and equal rights for all.
The reconstruction of Western culture has begun. It may take a long time before its successes become visible, but the turn begins in the minds of human beings. That was the core message at the start of the second day of the ARC conference.