Once there was a tree in a back garden. The inhabitants of the house knew that there was something wrong with it, since some of its branches were withered or diseased. But they couldn’t agree on what to do about it.
One said: ‘scientists have looked into this problem. Dr. Smith has said that the diseased branches are that way because most of the xylem cells inside the trunk are dead. We must get them out, we need to do major surgery on the tree.’
Another replied: ‘But Professor Jones says it’s normal for a tree trunk to be mostly made up of dead cells. They may be dead but they’re still performing an essential function by providing structural support. In any case, the dead cells and the living ones are so tightly bound up together that you couldn’t get rid of the dead cells without destroying a lot of the living ones.’
However, it was pointed out that this position was not radical and bold; indeed, it was possibly not even modern. And so the surgery was done, and the inhabitants of the house were very upset when what was left of the tree collapsed onto their kitchen.
I’m afraid we’ve wandered off into the familiar territory of conservative metaphor-mongering. 'We did it before, and can do it again': true, but it wasn't very pretty or indeed at all democratic last time. I recently read Veronica Wedgwood's fine book The Trial of Charles I which makes it fairly clear that the execution of the King, however necessary we can see it to be in retrospect, was very unpopular and would not have happened without a military coup in December 1648.
So: these are some further reflections on the question of why it makes sense to retain the monarchy, inspired by reflection on the preferred metaphors of the various traditions of Western political thought since the Enlightenment. ‘Supports’, as used in VS’ original post, is an architectural metaphor of the type beloved of socialists, Marxists and radicals. The other popular metaphors are the mechanical and organic.
– architectural metaphors – such as ‘superstructure' and 'foundations’ - imply that society should be viewed as humanly created or artificial and static. Society should therefore be relatively easy to change, with little risk of unplanned consequences, provided that buttressing is in place (a relatively simple procedure). Furthermore, the existing building must have no essential change from the original building: hence its faults are the same now as in the past. It’s therefore by implication just to correct past injustice by punishing the present-day descendants of the original builders or architects.
- mechanical metaphors – in which society and the economy are viewed as a type of machine. This metaphor is implicit in the idea of ‘piecemeal social engineering’ - Popper’s idea, essentially the animating spirit of both parties in the reformist-liberal post-war consensus. (Several unargued points there, apologies: I think the post-war consensus was liberal in the modern sense though plainly not in the C19 sense. Was Popper a liberal? A reformer, at any rate; Brian Magee thought his views were consistent with social democracy – which I take to be practically indistinguishable from Hobhouse’s welfare liberalism.) This metaphor leads to a fundamentally scientific and rational approach to social change, i.e. that change must assume that human beings are ultimately rational – a leap of faith.
Under the spell of this metaphor, society must be viewed as something that could in principle be stopped for repairs, in which it’s possible to replace one faulty part without too many knock-on effects or unintended consequences (depending on the part in question). Thus, the results of our actions are somewhat predictable, if rather more risky and fiddly than with a building – there is limited but in principle controllable unpredictability.
(I wouldn't make too much of this, since there is no single thinker as overwhelmingly important to liberals as Marx is to socialists. I've barely scratched the surface of a big subject, and hardly touched on many aspects of political metaphor which are discussed here, for example.)
- organic (conservative) metaphors are perhaps most familiar. Society is seen as a living thing with no direct human creator: follows own laws and urges, has own dynamic and a capacity for self-adjustment and repair. Therefore it’s not merely dependent on external command & control. Furthermore, actions affecting one part will affect most other parts: there is deep unpredictability.
The great value of monarchy (apart from the reasons I gave in my debut post) is that it provides a basically innocuous focus for irrationalism. I don’t believe that it is a main cause of irrationalism, which is innate and irreducible (plenty of room for reasonable people to disagree on that point, of course, but I submit that our views on the fundamental rationality of humanity are ultimately grounded in faith – which is perhaps a bootstraps argument for those who believe in fundamental irrationalism! Sorry, that’s naughty of me).
Evidence for the irreducibility of irrationalism is everywhere, though. Republics have plenty of alternative fetishes – cf. France, the USA, Germany – they have (in no particular order) nationalism, racism, la gloire, laicite, guns, psychotherapy, self-pity… Their fetishes are not necessarily better than ours (though it must be said we share most of them).
(Update 9/2/05: All of that isn't strictly relevant to the whole organic-metaphor thing, but it sort of came to mind.)
Also, as I try to show in my picture at the head of this post, there is too high a likelihood of damage to the tree from trying to remove a diseased, dead or malfunctioning set of cells. The cells in question are not discrete enough to be simple. It might be better to just lop off a diseased bough. (Of course, this assumes that the monarchy is part of the trunk and not a diseased bough itself: I think the monarchy’s age is the decisive piece of evidence there. Anything a over thousand years old is pretty well embedded and shouldn’t be removed unless the problems it causes are severe, urgent and obvious to all.)
In modern society the key feature is immense, ramifying, interlocking complexity. That was true even in the eighteenth century and is truer still now. Given that, any attempt to get rid of a major institution (when there is no imminent peril) is at best a distraction from weightier matters and at worst self-destructive.