18 February 2025
Published in the Daily Telegraph
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“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing” said John F Kennedy in 1961. For too long, decent people have been too passive as utopian ideas about the end of history have led to military weakness, climate catastrophism has led to economic decline, identity politics has strained social cohesion, and gender ideology has led to the medical sterilisation of children – to name only some of the follies of these times.
As Vice-President JD Vance has just pointed out, in an electrifying address to the mediocrities running Europe: across the West, governments and institutions have become increasingly hostile and repressive towards free speech they don’t like and even free votes that might end up supporting so-called “populist” parties – the pejorative term that elites apply to movements that voters like but they don’t. As Vance said, in the end, it wasn’t so much military and economic strength that won the Cold War but the moral force of freedom that inspired the peoples of Eastern Europe; paradoxically, just as those of Western Europe were starting to forget what had made them great. “We must”, he said, “not just talk about democratic values but live them”.
The aim of the second Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference, now meeting in London, is to recall leaders and thinkers to what’s best in our civilisation, so that our current troubles might not mark a slide into decadence and eclipse, but a new appreciation of all that’s produced, until quite recently, the best times in human history. Bringing together some 4000 delegates, including about 200 from Australia, ARC aims to avert this “civilisational moment”, verging on crisis, by telling “a better story” about the countries which, for all their imperfections, have turned out to be the ones that people yearn to live in. Unlike most international conferences, that typically deal with politics or economics, this one delves into culture and values; because politics is downstream of culture and culture is downstream of faith.
The essence of Western civilisation is the notion that every person, regardless of race, gender, or religion, is equal in rights and dignity. The original inspiration, that’s steadily come closer to fruition over two millennia, can be found in St Paul’s admonition to the Galatians: “there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus”. Then there’s the concept of impartial justice and equality before the law; the “golden rule”, accessible to human reason, but perhaps best summed up in the gospel injunction to “do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the law and the prophets”. The principles underpinning our societies: freedom of speech, freedom of association, and freedom of religion, that flow from these deep-seated cultural convictions about human dignity and reciprocity, are now only selectively applied. Even the rule of law is degenerating into the rule of lawyers.
As Vance told his fellow Western leaders at the security conference in Munich, it’s the threat within that’s the bigger crisis. Sure, Europe’s leaders are rightly fearful of Russian militarism and don’t want Putin’s aggression to be rewarded by the dismemberment of Ukraine, but how can they meaningfully stand up for freedom abroad when they are only-too-ready to stifle freedom at home by outlawing “wrong think” and cancelling anyone and anything that offends the canons of political correctness?
There is a massive challenge to be faced: from the communist dictatorship in Beijing bullying all its neighbours, even India; from the Islamist one in Tehran, set on the annihilation of Israel; as well as the militarist one in Moscow determined again to dominate Eastern Europe. But the even bigger challenge is the collapse of self-belief in the West, in the Anglosphere especially: with Britons self-flagellating over the empire, Australians turning British settlement into a kind of original sin, and Americans inclined to see their whole national project as tainted by slavery. Although perhaps the Trump ascendancy is a sign that we’ve finally passed peak woke. It’s little wonder that young people tell pollsters that they won’t fight for their country when they’ve been indoctrinated for decades into doubting their national self-worth.
The last time the West faced a comparable challenge, indeed after an earlier conference in Munich which resulted in the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, Winston Churchill declared that Britain has “sustained a defeat without a war” and that “this is but the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year, unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigour… we take our stand for freedom as in the olden time”. That’s really what the ARC conference is about: a return to moral health and a recovery of the courage to stand for freedom.