153. PHILOSOPHY AND THE CORONATION - Questions Raised By The Crowning Of A New King
The coronation of a new King is an undoubtedly historic moment, but it raises a lot of philosophical questions.
The first big one is whether a country can truly be a democracy (ruled by the people) when it remains a monarchy (ruled by a monarch). The two ideas are in inherent conflict. If a country is ruled by its monarch then it is not ruled by its people. A country ruled by its people cannot be ruled by a monarch, etc.
But of course there are caveats - what if the people chose to let a monarch rule? What if they decided to delegate sovereignty? We accept this with governments and democratically elected leaders all the time and still call it a democracy, so why not with a democratically elected monarch?
First it can be (and has been) disputed that what we have when we do delegate power to elected governments and leaders in a supposed democracy is actually authentic democracy anymore. But even if we accept that such governments remain democratic, the nature of a monarch is such that to be a monarch (and not merely a democratic leader) one’s power is supposed to be something different than the democratic construction of a government. The monarch becomes the sovereign. Not merely one of a sovereign people. It is supposed to be divine, god-given power, inherited through bloodline and absolute. Supernatural. To democratically choose to accept such power over you is not to choose one form of leadership out of many possibilities, but to actively give up democratic power to another vision of power entirely.
Second, there is a whole other issue: god. If a monarch gets their authority from god, if - in the UK case - the monarch leads a particular faith group and is designated “defender” of that faith, then is there really room for such outdated and superstitious nonsense in a twenty-first century polity? I dismiss the idea of god as an atheist, and this, perhaps facetious, rejection of a divine hand in the crowning of a king points to the fact that a 21st century democracy is inescapably pluralistic. There are many equally reasonable deeply held beliefs and world views that all need to coexist and intermingle. Not just theist versus atheist, but all the different varieties of each. If there is to be a singular leader within such pluralistic entities as contemporary liberal democracies, is a monarch, supposedly selected by a being many don’t even believe in (and even more don’t specifically believe to be their god) really the best choice? And should they - as supposed highest authority in the land - be so specifically entangled in one single denomination of one minority religion (in the most recent UK census less than half the population identified as “Christian”)?
To me it already seems like the anachronism that is the monarchy has no place in a modern pluralistic democracy, let alone a distinctly theocratic monarchy, and yet I write this the day before the coronation of Charles III. At the school where I work we were all invited to wear red, white and blue today (I declined and wore a black CM Punk hoodie instead) and special coronation cupcakes were distributed to the students at break time. Lunch was coronation chicken (or coronation tofu burgers for veggies like me). There were a lot of Union Jacks around and I believe assembly this morning involved giving our good wishes to the new king (I wouldn’t know - luckily a meeting precluded me from attending). Tomorrow there are many street parties and celebratory events being held around the country, including in the town where I live. Monday, the day this will be published, we have a bank holiday to celebrate the occasion. God save the king and all that.
Which raises several more issues. While it is undeniable that many in the country truly do love the monarchy and think the coronation ought to be observed as an important event in the calendar, not everyone does. Many, like me, think it is a shockingly tone-deaf way to be spending public money at a time of a cost-of-living crisis. Or perhaps that, given its conceptual clash with our supposed democratic values, it is just something we shouldn’t be celebrating at all. That to celebrate such a thing is to concede only the failure of our supposed democratic ideals. Given this, perhaps the event should be carried out in much the same way big religious celebrations often are: a big deal to the faithful but a total non-event to those who don’t believe?
This is not to say the coronation should be stopped, but rather to say it should maybe be an event to be observed by only those who believe it to be worth observing, not something students are encouraged to care about at school, television channels are expected to broadcast endlessly on about, football matches are supposed to mark before kick-off, and whole industries are required to shut down over?
Before you ask - yes, I think the same should be true of Christmas (though there’s nothing wrong with us still having a winter public holiday, just like there was nothing wrong with last Monday’s bank holiday, or indeed having a holiday on any Monday for the sake of just taking a break). Consider the recent Islamic festival of Eid al-Fitr as an example of what I mean. The Eid after Ramadan is a huge event in the Muslim world and is celebrated significantly in the city where I live as we have a large Muslim population. But as a non-Muslim I didn’t have to celebrate if I didn’t want to and this massively significant occasion in some people’s lives passed completely unnoticed for others. Different worldviews coexisting. Christmas (and the coronation) should be like that too. You do you (collectively if you have similar ideas to others) but let others do as they wish too. For me, each year, Wrestlemania is a really big deal. Even though I barely watch the WWE product anymore I still observe the tradition that got me into wrestling fandom in the first place. Yet I do not expect the whole world to share in my peculiar personal interest and pause their entire life for a weekend each year the way I do. Certain events and places have great meaning for some of us that mean absolutely nothing to everyone else, and we should all be able to enjoy them and express our beliefs. But when we assume everyone else must celebrate too we are making an assumption too far. Let Charles get his crown on Saturday, let those who want to wish him well do so, but let the rest of us not have to be involved.
Which brings me to the proposed “chorus of a million voices” we have all been invited to participate in. Citizens (subjects?) are all invited to swear allegiance to the new king in a so-called “Homage of the People”. The crowd participation further proof this is a pantomime. The word “invitation” has been used a lot surrounding these coronation events. A gentle reminder that there is no obligation. A nod to democratic freedom and the right to reject the authority of the crown. But at the same time police around Windsor and Westminster have vowed to clamp down on protesters throughout the coronation weekend, use oppressive face recognition technology to identify and silence dissent, threatening republican groups and removing any possibility of disruption from the intended pageantry. (Indeed - as I edit this for posting on Sunday morning, we witnessed many members of the anti-monarchy protest group, Republic, get arrested early on Saturday morning under new anti-protesting powers before they had even started their protest, a deeply worrying and anti-democratic display of abusive state power). An invitation where refusal to turn up has the possible threat of state-sanctioned violence against you as a consequence is no invitation at all.
At the same time, one would look equally unkindly on those who decided to protest and ruin meaningful religious events they didn’t believe in too. One might even call it a hate crime. And here the tensions and incoherencies at the heart of having a monarchy co-existing with a supposed democracy are laid bare. If I oppose your deeply held religious beliefs with angry, disruptive protest, we are perhaps right to see this as something criminal. Something maybe even to be prevented. A refusal to uphold the liberal value of pluralistic acceptance of different belief systems and allow people to carry out traditions and rituals they deem to be important. The very same principle which allows me to freely reject the religion of others allows them to observe it. A principle of live and let live. But the coronation of King Charles has not been framed as a private religious ritual. When your tradition and ritual claim some sort of public allegiance and a place at the heart of the political organisation of our society, it becomes something entirely different. It becomes a reasonable target of political protest. #NotMyKing holds legitimacy as a piece of public protest within a supposed democracy in a way that #NotMyPersonalInterpretationOfScripture or #NotMyReligiousFestival or even #NotMyGod does. When I disrupt an Easter procession, a Vaisakhi festival, or a Bar Mitzvah, I am intruding on someone, or some group’s, expression of a deeply held belief they are not trying to force anyone to share. When I disrupt the coronation of a man I am being told I ought to swear allegiance to and who, by mere dint of birthright, is apparently allowed to inform the very laws I have to follow and hold political authority in a country I am supposed to hold some form of democratic sovereignty in, I am legitimately enacting some of that sovereignty and refusing an illegitimate authority in public life when I stand up and say “no!” to it.
A further philosophical consideration in all this, therefore, is about perception and reality. For one might rightly say that I am somewhat blowing the supposed power of the new King out of all proportion when I paint the new King as a serious threat to democracy. That the British monarch has, for many years now, been merely a symbolic figurehead with no real authority at all. That Saturday’s coronation is more about branding than it is about the divine right of kings. We are just the country people associate with the royal family and we need to give the public what it wants for fear our tourist trade will drop off without it. The coronation of the King, the royal cipher on post boxes, Buckingham Palace, a royal seal on certain brands of food - it’s all just part of the marketing we have chosen, our unique selling point, on the global stage. A story we have decided to tell but know isn’t real. If King Charles really tried to flex his supposed authority, there would be outrage. To worry about his role is to mistake illusion for reality.
To this I ask us to consider the power of stories. Especially the ones we keep telling ourselves as a culture. Whether actual or merely fabricated, the story we tell, of a family more special than others, a family with more rights than everyone else, a family we ought to bow and scrape to, is a story which becomes reality the more that we tell it. To protect the story, we participate in the fiction so much that it because identical to the truth. And more than this, this one story can be used to prop up other terrible stories. For as long as there is a King with more power than you have, why not also a boss? As long as there is a royal family with more property and land than the rest of us, why not billionaires? As long as inequality is established through divine right, why bother striving for a more equitable world? Ideologically, when we accept the story of a monarchy as part of the story of our democracy we have already left ourselves open to contradiction and confusion. We have already accepted that we can pay for a man to ride a golden carriage through the city, crowned in stolen jewels, while others in that same city cannot even afford to pay their utility bills. That this particular family can stand and wave from a balcony as fighter planes fly by, guzzling the fossil fuels that are killing the planet and symbolising the military might of an empire that has caused misery for so many around the world even as we talk about the climate crisis and wanting an end to war and oppression. That this sort of thing is important and worth coming together for when there are real struggles people are left to face alone.
When I find myself thinking about these issues I guess my conclusion is that the crown can’t have it both ways. If the monarchy were accepted as merely a quirky and antiquated belief system many in the UK still hold and the event of the coronation were perceived as simply an important religious event in the calendar of these particular people, then it would be uncontroversial for it to go ahead with as much pomp and ritual as they want it to and can afford (so long as it is not funded by the tax-payer) without the whole country being dragged along for the ride. Those who care can swoon and bow as much as they wish, and those who don’t can ignore it. To protest such a monarchy would be like anti-war protesters picketing a weekend reenactment: a waste of time it is hard to see the motivation for.
If the monarchy wants to persevere with the idea, however, that the King has a genuine role in public life as a legitimate political authority within our supposed democracy then it has to accept that, within such democracies, people are entitled to disagree with that. Reject the premise. And that they might express that disagreement through protest. Even revolution. That democracies have always been born in protest, throwing off the shackles and enforced mysteries of illegitimate authorities of all stripes, and that non-democratic forms of leadership and hierarchy clinging on when they are no longer relevant to a more progressive and evolved form of public life will continue to face disruption and dissent until they either finally fade away, or democracy does.
As I said: the coronation of a new King is an undoubtedly historic moment, but it raises a lot of philosophical questions.
Author: DaN McKee (he/him)
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