Read the full transcript of Sunday Times bestselling author, satirist, social commentator Konstantin Kisin’s speech at ARC Conference 2023…
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Hello and thank you.
The Importance of Spiritual Life
Alexander Solzhenitsyn once said that the strength or weakness of a society depends more on the level of its spiritual life than on its level of industrialization. If a nation’s spiritual energies have been exhausted, he said, it will not be saved from collapse by the most perfect government structure or by any industrial development. A tree with a rotten core cannot stand.
When he was allowed to leave the USSR, Solzhenitsyn went to the US, where he was given a hero’s welcome. But he quickly realized that American society was far from perfect. He started lecturing Americans about the problems he saw. Americans don’t like that.
Like Solzhenitsyn, I come from the Soviet Union, but I have no intention of repeating his mistake. That’s why I’ve come to Britain, where you love being told what’s wrong with you by foreigners.
Losing Faith in Civilization
But I do have to be honest. Six months ago, when Jordan and Philippa asked me to come here and speak at ARC about the importance of audacity, adventure, and a positive vision for our civilization, I was honored and delighted.
But as I stand here today, after watching crowds openly celebrate mass murder on the streets of our cities, after watching the police spend more time debating Islamic theology on Twitter than enforcing the law, I’m starting to lose faith. I don’t know how long our civilization will survive. For years now, many of us have been warning that the barbarians are at the gates. We were wrong.
They’re inside. Now, look, I’m not going to be all doom and gloom. There are positives as well. I mean, say what you want about Hamas supporters. At least they know what a woman is.
But joking aside, I have to be honest. I’ve been in a dark place these last few weeks. So I did what I always do when I don’t know what to do. I talked to my wife. It’s not the only time I talk to her, but you don’t get the point.
And she said, “Look, you need to clear your mind, take a few days off, let’s go on holiday.” I know it’s a weird thing to say, I don’t like going on holiday, because I love working and I hate spending money. Protestant work ethic in a Jewish man’s body. My wife is exactly the other way around, unfortunately. But she was right. She’s always right. That’s her best and most annoying quality.
The Lesson of Christopher Columbus
So we went to Barcelona, beautiful city. And as we were walking down the main tourist street, La Rambla, many of you will know when you get to the bottom, you hit the Christopher Columbus monument. It looks like a giant column with a pillar of Columbus on top pointing towards the new world.
This reminded me of my son, Nikolai. He’s 16 months, and this is what he does. He sits on my hip and points in the direction he wants to go. Treats me like a horse, basically. And if I don’t act quickly enough, or if I don’t comply, he does what all toddlers do. He throws a tantrum and starts screaming, “How dare you? You have stolen my dreams with your empty words.” And when he does, we read him a story and put him to bed. We don’t give him a standing ovation in front of the UN.
Anyway, trigger warning, I’m going to talk positively about Christopher Columbus. I know he committed some pretty sizable microaggressions, but he also changed the world. Do you know why he changed the world? Yeah, he tried to reach India and by accident discovered America. But why go west to India?
Europeans had been trading with India and China for centuries via the Silk Road. Why risk your life to go out on a limb? There were many reasons, of course, but the main one was the decision to try and reach Asia by going west was not made out of choice. Europe was desperate. Only a few decades prior, in 1453, the Ottomans sacked Constantinople and they cut Europe off from the Silk Road. The west was facing a huge challenge and a new threat, no smaller than the one we face today. And like us, what they needed was another way.
But when Columbus took his idea to go west to India, to the kings and queens of medieval Europe, they laughed at him. They didn’t laugh at him because he was some misunderstood genius, he wasn’t Galileo. They laughed at him because he was wrong.
If you go out in the street and ask a random person why Columbus discovered America, they’ll tell you he worked out that the earth was round. Not true. By the time Columbus set off on his voyage in 1492, people had known the earth was round for two millennia. There’s probably more flat earthers now than there were in the 15th century. God bless the internet.
The reason Columbus discovered America is not that he’d worked out that the earth was round. The reason is that he massively underestimated the size of a planet. They were right to laugh at him. He was wrong. But he took that wrongness, he persuaded 90 other men to get into three boats smaller than the size of this stage and sail into the unknown. And he persuaded Queen Isabella of Castile and King Ferdinand of Aragon to fund his voyage.
The moral of the story is, it doesn’t matter how wrong you are, as long as you’ve got rich friends. That’s not the moral of the story. The moral of the story is, the history of our civilization was not made by people who always got everything right. It was made by people who’d made mistakes, too. It was made by people who dared to believe that they could solve the problems they faced.
The Story of the West
The story of the West is a story of audacity.