Breaking the inevitable path
The story of the modern secular west has followed the extremes of a great pendulum: wonderful scientific achievements and devastating industrial wars, a great elan towards freedom with a counterpoint of authoritarian control, unheard of decreases in poverty coupled with a crippling rise of loneliness and despair. The recent events surrounding Covid have accentuated the underlying rifts which drive us towards a bleak future of fractured individuality mirrored by iron-fisted tyranny.
In order to fight the difficulties and fears brought about by a fraying social fabric, or to halt a perceived ecological apocalypse caused by industrial economies, many leading global organizations have turned to accelerating the very mechanisms of the pendulum, fostering more top-down control coupled with the worship of our splintering differences. This tendency towards extremes can no longer be blamed simply on over-bearing governments or on corporate interests, rather it is a creeping narrative which feeds into all aspects of the modern world, fostering visions of the future which are often anti-human in their control and trans-human in their values.
ARC appears as a possible break in what seems like an inevitable path. It gives us the possibility of rethinking the very basic thrust which feeds the great pendulum, envisioning a balanced world built on different forms of subsidiarity: nested relationships of thriving people in healthy families, all belonging to binding communities in collaborating nations. Is it possible to make the best of our economic and scientific growth without giving into overbearing gigantism and tyranny, or to chaos and despair? Can we gather people of good will in order to ask difficult but essential questions about who we are and where we are going? At ARC we hope to spark and foster a new story which is not led by fear, but by beauty and hope, not led by control or by worship of idiosyncrasy, but by a rediscovery of the spirit and vision which still binds us to the deep values and communities we recognize as sacred.
