Should We Climb Aboard The ARC?

And: Trump's Hideous IVF Order; Eric Weinstein On 'Vitalism'

‘David, I know my head is grotesquely large. But I have come to believe that the burden of having a fat head has been a blessing of humility.’

Fidna start the third and final day of ARC. Because Sebastian Milbank summarized Day Two, I don’t have to. Excerpt:

An equally lively and thoughtful panel followed, with Rod Dreher calling for a more mystical, less worldly Christianity and Amy Orr-Ewing identifying a growing spiritual thirst amongst the young. This, far more than corporate lectures about progress, seemed to connect with and energise the audience.

One of the best events of the day was a debate involving Daniel Hannan and former Australian PM Tony Abbott, making the case for free trade, with Michael Gove and Oren Cass arguing for protectionism. Cass is the chief economist of American Compass, and the author of The Once and Future Worker. Cass, perhaps more than any other figure in American conservative politics, has been challenging Reaganite economic orthodoxy, questioning shibboleths around free trade and free markets, and locating the worker, not the capitalist, at the cause of American prosperity.

Hannan and Abbott appeared dogmatic and out of touch, speaking in abstractions, compared to Gove and Cass, who pointed to the threat of China, and the devastation wrought on post-industrial communities, and made a pragmatic, measured case for strategic protectionism. This was an embodiment of the rift I identified yesterday between two different generations of conservatism, one stuck in the 80s, the other dissident, intellectually engaged, and determined to shake up the establishment. Indeed, the political ground was moving beneath Hannan and Abbott’s feet at that very moment. Before the event started, a large majority of the audience voted in favour of free trade — by the end, a majority favoured protectionism.

Milbank goes on to say that it would be even better if ARC would platform a broader range of dissident-Right voices, like Paul Kingsnorth’s. Here is what PK had to say about ARC a couple of weeks ago:

The ‘Alliance for Responsible Citizenship’, which is guided largely by right-liberal establishment types with large media profiles, is what we might these days call ‘Christian-coded’, but its stated aims, again, seem to have very little to do with Christ. ARC wants a ‘unifying story’ for the West, a focus on family and community, the promotion of ‘free enterprise’, and some nice, responsible discussions about resource extraction and the importance of growth. Some of these may be good things, and there are some good people involved in the project - including Jonathan Pageau, whose work I admire. Still, what is being promoted here is not Christianity, or even ‘Christian civilisation.’ It is the needs and desires of liberal, Western modernity: the creed of Faustian man. The Christian faith, where it appears, is entirely secondary to the project of renewing Western politics and culture.

This is not surprising. Jordan Peterson’s idiosyncratic definitions of God - ‘something like the spirit of hierarchical harmony’, or ‘the benevolence that shines through the good father’, or ‘the call to adventure’ - describe a deity built for psychological or social utility, and his angry anti-woke, anti-green politics make clear what his idea of a ‘responsible citizen’ is. But Jesus didn’t come to Earth to teach us how to be ‘responsible citizens’, of any political stripe. Responsible citizens don’t leave their own fathers unburied. They don’t hate their own mother and father, or give away all of their wealth, or compare the religious authorities to whitewashed tombs full of rotting flesh. And they don’t usually end up being crucified.

Well, okay. I agree with Sebastian that it would have been terrific to have heard PK deliver a jeremiad to the audience. But look, the ARC conference never was about Christianity. There are Christians here speaking (I have been one of them), but this is not a religious event. And I don’t think it’s tainted, somehow, for Christians to bring our perspective to these events. This is an ongoing point of (friendly) dispute between Paul and me — and Paul reads and comments here, so I welcome his intervention, though if I don’t answer, it’s only because I will have been too busy to have checked in on the comments thread. Paul strongly believes that I should drop all the culture war stuff in my writing. I don’t think that’s wise, on the grounds that I believe it matters a great deal whether or not we have a culture and a political order that is conducive to life, or oriented towards death.

“Saving” Western civilization, or recovering our culture, is not the same thing as salvation. A culture warrior might or might not become a saint. We are all called to be saints. Nevertheless, when Douglas Murray (not a Christian) yesterday, from the stage, denounced the current attempt by the UK Labour government to advance assisted suicide, this is a position with which Christians must sympathize, and a cause (fighting assisted suicide) that we must take up, if we can. I can’t see the value in refusing to engage with these people, on grounds of religious purity.

I said in my brief ARC remarks — at least I think I said; I spoke spontaneously — that politics are necessary to civilizational renewal, but not sufficient. I said that ultimately, our civilizational crisis is a crisis of meaning, and that means, at bottom, a religious crisis. I did not say, but might have had I more time, that the historian Tom Holland has taught us that nearly every good thing about our civilization came down to us because our ancestors were Christians. God knows they were flawed, as all of us are, but the moral code that guided them, and by which they measured their success or failure, was that of the Bible. I think it was Brooks yesterday who said on stage that the US Civil Rights movement, which challenged and overturned racial segregation, was led by black pastors, who did so on both Biblical and constitutional grounds. That crusade, I think, is a model for Christian public engagement.

My Benedict Option idea has never been about total cultural withdrawal. As I say in the book, there is really no place to escape to — and besides, unless we are called to be monastics, we have a responsibility to be present in this world. But given the aggressively anti-Christian condition of the West, if Christians are to be an authentic Christian witness to this world, then we can only accomplish this by leading more authentically Christian lives, in terms of intentional discipleship, at some meaningful remove from the world. I see Modern Orthodox Jews as a good example of this. They are engaged with the world in various professions, but they lead lives of real spiritual discipline: when the calling of the world conflicts with their calling from God, they choose God. If, for example, there’s a big corporate dinner party on Shabbat, well, sorry, they observe the Sabbath. This might seem like a small thing, but the impact is potentially enormous.

It matters what kind of economy we have. Does Christianity have anything to say about, say, free trade versus protectionism? I think so, yes. You will not be able to find an economic program in the Bible, but biblical principles are important to guide our economic thinking. Peter Maurin, who, with Dorothy Day, founded the Catholic Worker movement, defined a good society as one in which it is easier to be good. For Maurin, of course, “good” is measured by the Bible’s standards. We can and should debate about what those standards are, and how they should apply to the world, and we should do so with the bedrock understanding that it is impossible to create an earthly utopia.

Nevertheless, I don’t believe Christians can be indifferent to these public matters. True, not everybody is called to be equally engaged on every question. I, for one, am not the man to ask for wisdom on economics. But I am grateful for economic thinkers who are also men and women of serious faith, because I want to understand how what we Christians believe is true in terms of the moral order might be realized in the organization of our common life. I don’t believe it’s of no matter whether or not the poor and working classes are treated as beside the point in terms of building a free-market international order; nor do I believe that it’s of no concern to Christians if doctrinaire socialists seek to impose an economic order that denies men their natural right to enjoy the just fruits of their labor, and that results in greater poverty for all, in pursuit of an abstract idea of fairness. What is an acceptable middle ground between these two poles? I would like to hear Christians argue this out.

Take migration, for example. There can be no doubt that Christians have a moral duty to show mercy to refugees and strangers. Sentimental maximalists like Pope Francis see no limit on that principle, even expecting the relatively wealthy societies of the West to open their borders to masses of foreigners. But as I’ve argued here, that is not only foolish, but immoral. It is typically the weakest groups in our society who suffer the most from mass immigration. Besides which, Europe over the past decades has taken in huge numbers of Muslims — people who are bearers of a rival faith, and with it a rival civilization. Is it really in the interests of the people who are already living in the lands of the West, especially people who still hold their ancestral faith, to allow their countries to fill up with foreigners whose religious and cultural beliefs are often antithetical to a host civilization built on Christian principles (however weakly held these days)?

Frankly, I would love to see somewhere a vigorous, theologically deep debate between Christian advocates for immigration liberalism and immigration conservatism. I don’t see the value of Christians deciding that it’s better not to dirty our hands with engagement on these issues. Similarly, as Milbank writes in his piece, the kind of natural ecology we have in our lands really does matter. Christianity has a lot to say about how we should treat Nature. I don’t want the debate to me merely a clash of fundamentalism, between fanatic Greens and ideological Capitalists. It might well be the case that our common condition is so far gone that these debates don’t really matter, but I don’t think so.

Right now, a new fusionism is emerging on the American Right, bringing tech bros like Elon Musk into a political coalition with social and religious conservatives. The dangers posed by transhumanists like Musk ought to be obvious to serious Christians. At the same time, we really do live in a post-Christian culture, and if we refuse on principle to engage with figures like Musk, we Christians are going to be marginalized, and fail to exercise some restraint on powerful tech avatars. The challenge is to avoid being co-opted by the Musks into providing religious cover to his un-Christian, even anti-Christian, programs. At the same time, it seems almost beyond argument to me that Musk is doing good and important work exposing the rottenness within the existing liberal system. We do not have to sanctify or demonize Elon Musk to engage with him and what he represents. But as we work with people like him, let us not be naive about who they are and what they represent. This requires a lot of practical wisdom.

In Live Not By Lies, I quote Christian anti-Communist dissidents from the Soviet era talking about how they made practical alliances with non-Christians against the totalitarian state. Kamila Bendova and her late husband Vaclav were the only Christians inside the inner circle of the Czech dissident leadership. But as Kamila told me, though they were hardline Catholics, she and her husband preferred to stand with the liberals (and even Petr Uhl, a Trotskyist) who took a brave and sacrificial stand against the Mordor that was their common fate, than with the quietist Christians who kept their heads down and conformed, hoping to avoid trouble.

I don’t believe every Christian in Communist Czechoslovakia was called to the same public mission as the Bendas (who in any case never would have claimed that the purpose of life, or the Christian life, is to exercise power in this world). But from my conversations with these former underground church leaders, it is also the case that it is possible to justify cowardice by an appeal to religious purity. There is not a clear, indisputable answer for every Christian, to the question, “What am I to do?” — that is, aside from “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself.” This God-given world has need of monks and nuns. It has need of priests. It also has need of construction workers and farmers, as well as doctors, lawyers, and economists. It even has need of writers and public intellectuals who argue about the best way to reconcile our ideals, moral and otherwise, with the possibilities open to us in the real world of Right Here, Right Now.

On that point, I took this photo in the green room yesterday, before I was called to the stage:

That’s Douglas Murray, Jordan Peterson, and Os Guinness watching a televised version of the talk David Brooks was delivering from the stage a few feet away. Only one of those men (Guinness) is a confessing Christian; Murray and Peterson are Christian-sympathetic. Nevertheless, I find that Murray and Peterson, however short they fall from a Christian ideal, offer dynamic and important ideas to meet the various crises of our time, and God only knows they have both shown immense courage in their own lives in advocating for their beliefs. I don’t agree with them on everything, but I was honored to be part of this conference with them, and to labor on their side, generally, in this project. Brooks, an old friend, and I argued in the green room about J.D. Vance; on the stage, he introduced me by highlighting briefly our disagreements, but saying that our friendship matters to him; I strongly agree. In fact, David, who is a Christian convert, and I are far apart on these things, but I value his perspective — seriously, I do! — and always want to hear what he has to say, as a challenge to my own views.

ARC, in general, is far more “right-liberal establishment” (PK’s term) than I am, but so what? I’ve met people here who do not share my religious beliefs, or the political convictions that come out of my understanding of religious truth, but who are, in my estimation, working in good faith towards creating a better world. The conversation is important. My general stance towards these things is that we cannot make the ideal the enemy of the Good Enough For Now. As I wrote yesterday, it is strange that it has taken a non-believing clown like Donald Trump to be the Great Disrupter. We do not have to agree with everything he does (see below), but I believe people like me can work with people like him in ways we simply could not do with those who were in power before.

To be clear, I believe ARC needs people like David Brooks and Paul Kingsnorth to be good faith critics of what many of its participants and collaborators believe. That’s because I believe intellectual humility is vitally important. No one person knows everything. I’ve mentioned here before about how, one week before my ex-wife divorced me via e-mail, I was at a Romanian monastery, and spoke with the abbot, seeking advice on how to deal with a marriage that had broken down a decade earlier, and that was nothing but a source of great pain for my then-wife and me. After listening to me for all of twenty minutes, he thundered that if we divorced, we would “both go to Hell.” He was very serious, but I walked out of there certain that one should always take advice, even from presumably holy monks, not as the voice of God. It might have been the case that we shouldn’t have divorced (it was not the opinion of Orthodox priests who knew us best, mind), but to tell someone who had been going through intense agony for so long, trying to save the unsalvageable, that he and his wife would suffer the fires of hell forever if they ended the marriage — that is, at best, spiritual malpractice.

I only bring that up to say that even the brightest and most ascetic people can be morally blind, or otherwise significantly hampered by their own all-too-human fallibility. This does not negate the real wisdom that they can and do bring to the discussion of human affairs, but it is a reminder that nobody knows everything, always. None of us are infallible.

Trump And IVF

Donald Trump has issued an executive order promoting IVF (in vitro fertilization). This is deeply distressing, as principled pro-lifers know. IVF results in the intentional creation of “surplus” human lives, and their discarding. You know this, right? If you believe that human life begins at conception, then there is no getting around the fact that all the embryos created and thrown away in the process of finding one that can be successfully implanted and brought to term are dead human beings. Around 93 percent of human beings conceived in a lab as part of IVF are discarded. That’s a lot of dead people.

Does this mean that babies conceived through IVF are evil? Of course not! Does the existence of such babies (and adults), all made in the image of God and infinitely beloved by Him therefore render IVF morally neutral, or even good? No, it does not.

I just ran into the Christian pro-family activist Katy Faust outside of the ARC event. We were both headed to our hotel rooms to write about Trump’s executive order. We are both deeply distressed by it (though not surprised, given that Trump said during the campaign that he would do this). If you want to know why IVF is wrong, watch this interview with Katy:

If you don’t have time for the whole Faust interview, watch this short animated video explaining why IVF is evil.

I am pleased to see on Twitter a number of conservative Christian pro-lifers calling out Trump for doing this — but also a few, like Frank Pavone, who are rationalizing it as, “He’s not as bad as the Democrats.” Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. We do not have to declare that Trump is the devil because of this, or to deny the many good things he has done, even for the pro-life cause. But we also cannot be silent on this matter of grave moral principle, just because Our Guy has taken the other side.

Aside from the life-or-death morality of the human beings conceived in a Petri dish, there is the matter of how IVF treats the creation of human life as a matter of technological manufacture. This cannot be right, nor can it be a matter of indifference. In his great 1995 encyclical Evangelium vitae, Pope St. John Paul II decried IVF in part because it treats human life as mere “biological material.”

Back in 2006, the left-wing magazine Mother Jones ran a bracing story by Liza Mundy on what IVF means for the sanctity of life. It begins like this:

Aanis Elspas is a mother of four. Unlike most parents, she had three of her children simultaneously. The nine-year-old triplets were born in 1997 after Elspas underwent a series of in vitro fertilization treatments for infertility. Her oldest child, 10, is the happy result of a prior IVF treatment round. Elspas worked hard to get her children, and is grateful to have them. But four, thanks very much, are plenty. The problem is that Elspas also has 14 embryos left over from the treatment that produced her 10-year-old. The embryos are stored in liquid nitrogen at a California frozen storage facility—she is not entirely sure where—while Elspas and her husband ponder what to do with them.

Give them away to another couple, to gestate and bear? Her own children’s full biological siblings—raised in a different family? Donate them to scientific research? Let them…finally…lapse? It is, she and her husband find, an intractable problem, one for which there is no satisfactory answer. So what they have done—thus far—is nothing. Nothing, that is, but agonize.

“I don’t have the heart to thaw them,” says Elspas, who works as media relations director for a multi-birth networking group called the Triplet Connection. “But then again, I don’t have the will to do something with them.”

Elspas is by no means alone, either in having frozen human embryos she and her husband must eventually figure out what to do with, or in the moral paralysis she feels, surveying the landscape of available choices. In fact, she is part of an explosively growing group. In 2002, the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology—the research arm for U.S. fertility doctors—decided to find out how many unused embryos had accumulated in the nation’s 430 fertility clinics. The rand consulting group, hired to do a head count, concluded that 400,000 frozen embryos existed—a staggering number, twice as large as previous estimates. Given that hundreds of thousands of IVF treatment rounds have since been performed, it seems fair to estimate that by now the number of embryos in limbo in the United States alone is closer to half a million.

This embryo glut is forcing many people to reconsider whatever they thought they thought about issues such as life and death and choice and reproductive freedom. It’s a dilemma that has been quietly building: The first American IVF baby was born in 1981, less than a decade after Roe v. Wade was decided. Thanks in part to Roe, fertility medicine in this country developed in an atmosphere of considerable reproductive freedom (read: very little government oversight), meaning, among other things, that responsibility for embryo disposition rests squarely with patients. The number of IVF rounds, or “cycles,” has grown to the point that in 2003 about 123,000 cycles were performed, to help some of the estimated 1 in 7 American couples who have difficulty conceiving naturally. Early on, it proved relatively easy to freeze a lab-created human embryo—which unlike, say, hamburger meat, can be frozen, and thawed, and refrozen, and thawed, and then used. (To be precise, the technical term is “pre-embryo,” or “conceptus”; a fertilized egg is not considered an embryo until about two weeks of development, and IVF embryos are frozen well before this point.) Over time—as fertility drugs have gotten more powerful and lab procedures more efficient—it has become possible to coax more and more embryos into being during the average cycle. Moreover, as doctors transfer fewer embryos back into patients, in an effort to reduce multiple births, more of the embryos made are subsequently frozen.

And so, far from going away, the accumulation of human embryos is likely to grow, and grow, and grow. And in growing, the embryo overstock is likely to change—or at least complicate—the way we collectively think about human life at its earliest stages, and morally what is the right thing to do with it. …

This was almost 20 years ago! As you will see if you read the whole story, the meaning of the lives of those frozen “concepti” (monstrous word) depends very much on the emotional state of their biological parents. Do we really want to be a society in which decisions about which innocent (= not guilty of a crime) human lives have the right to live or die, based solely on whether or not those responsible for bringing them into existence want them or not? We already are! Pro-lifers like to think we know the answer to that question. But how many of us really do? You will be able to tell by how pro-life individuals react to what Trump has done here.

Kisin & Weinstein This Morning At ARC

Konstantin Kisin at ARC

This morning’s session was a really good one. It began with a rousing speech by Konstantin Kisin . Best line: “Multiethnic societies can work; multicultural societies cannot.” His point is that if we broadly share the same cultural values, our racial differences might not ultimately matter. But if we do not share a common culture, we face nothing but trouble.

After saying that as an atheist progressive Jew, he might not be the fullest expression of an ARC speaker, Eric Weinstein delivered a powerful talk. He started by calling the movement to sexually transition children “a reproductive holocaust,” and said that at his son’s high school, trans propaganda is everywhere. This is a front in the culture war, which Weinstein said is how warfare is primarily fought these days. Far from being a mere distraction, culture war is a form of “hybrid warfare,” a term coined in 2007 by Frank Hoffman to describe alternative ways of waging war.

“Non-shooting wars have no borders and no end,” said Weinstein. The Internet and the homeland is the front.”

That, and human beings. Said Weinstein, “They use our social scientists and our universities to fight us.”

Weinstein said that theorists and advocates of hybrid warfare call for a “whole of society” approach, one that mandates that all of a society’s institutions be aligned with the goals of the state. This is precisely what we have been living with in the West for many decades, he said (he could have brought up the neoreactionary concept of “the Cathedral” to describe it).

Weinstein, a physicist by training, pointed out that nearly all of the technology we use has a “portal” through which the intelligence agencies can use to spy on you. Our phones and our laptops are listening devices, and even can be manipulated to surveil us visually. (Edward Snowden wrote in his memoir a decade ago about how, as an NSA contractor, he did exactly that.)

In terms of hybrid warfare, Weinstein said, “Right now we treat Europe like a quaint Disneyland, when in fact it is the most dangerous place on earth.” He went on to say that the governments that have been empowered in Europe since the end of World War II, and the cultures the power-holders there have manufactured, have served to de-vitalize Europe, for the sake of keeping the peace. The problem is, this is killing Europe. He calls this “soft fascism”; I call it “soft totalitarianism.”

In the US, with the accession to the presidency of Donald Trump, the West is entering an era of “revitalization” — meaning that it is returning to an age of action, including active repudiation of devitalizing ideals and practices.

Weinstein cited Marc Andreessen’s revelation last December that he met with Biden White House officials in the spring of 2024, and they warned him that the government was going to throttle AI research, in the same way that earlier administrations had throttled physics: for the sake of keeping things under control. Weinstein said that around 1973, all real advances in physics stopped. He believes this was intentional, that this is what de-vitalization means.

We have to get off this planet, says Weinstein, because it is not possible, given humanity’s destructive capacities, and given human nature, that we can all live here together, indefinitely, without annihilating ourselves. He foresees this new vitalism as perhaps the last chance humanity has to figure out how to use physics to save the species. We have to face the likelihood that a return to vitalism means a return to humanity’s natural state: war.

“We have a brief period of vitality before the wars inevitably start,” he concluded. “I hope we use it well.”

Now, look, you know that I have extreme skepticism that there is or ever can be a technological fix for our deep problems, much less for human nature. I’m sure Eric Weinstein would disagree more often than we would agree. Nevertheless, I believe we should take Weinstein very seriously, though again, let me emphasize that that does not imply that we have to accept his proposed solutions. I’m simply saying that he is one of those people who might be telling us what we don’t want to hear, but what we nevertheless need to hear.

In fact, if he’s right about the return to “vitality” leading inevitably to wars, then I believe we religiously observant Christians should begin to think, and think hard, about how governments and corporations might deploy technology to keep the peace (falsely) through the surveillance state (see Live Not By Lies). I foresee that sooner or later, we will be offered a way out of the problem of global warfare, one that will require us to live by lies. You know what I’m talking about. It’s here in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, though not only Catholics believe this:

675 Before Christ's second coming the Church must pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers. [Lk 18:8; Mt 24:12] The persecution that accompanies her pilgrimage on earth [Lk 21:12; Jn 15:19-20] will unveil the "mystery of iniquity" in the form of a religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth. The supreme religious deception is that of the Antichrist, a pseudo-messianism by which man glorifies himself in place of God and of his Messiah come in the flesh. [2 Thess 2:4-12; 1 Thess 5:2-3; 2 Jn 7; 1 Jn 2:18,22]

We don’t know when this will happen … but there are signs of the times for those with open eyes and open ears. My last three books — The Benedict Option, Live Not By Lies, and Living In Wonder are calls to open eyes and ears, and advice for how to do it. “For thus has the Lord said to me: ‘Go, set a watchman, Let him declare what he sees.’” (Isaiah 21:6)

I try to be a watchman. You try to be too.