To retain some residual—or, if we prefer, essential—alignment with their origin, traditional institutions must occasionally repeat the act by which they were first brought into being.
They must non-identically imitate their own foundation, just as I must daily imitate my birth by waking up in the morning—as well as, more rarely, engaging in those super-efforts, those denials of the flesh, those ascetic exercises that will yield psychological and spiritual rebirth.
If the Church was founded by an act that revealed life through (against) the false finality of death, standing defiant in the face of deadening doctrines (the pharaonic leadership of state-worship and the pharisaic legalism of religious hypocrisy), then every local parish must either recognize when circumstances call upon it to display the same spiritual courage or end up becoming a mockery.
Monarchy is no exception.
Yet, in the case of certain long-lasting institutions, especially ruling dynasties, it may be objected that the moral character of those whom history credits with establishing them is seldom above reproach. Fine—then let those institutions connect with their originating idea, if not their founding event: the principle that justifies them, however imperfectly practiced by their predecessors.
We should honor the bodies that have structured public life, respect them for carrying on with due decorum, for preserving their dignity, but if that is all they do—and all we do for them—they will become a hollow substitute for themselves.
We should honor what is good and wholesome, especially during key moments (funerals, coronations, etc.). The aesthetic absorption of a people in its own rites is beautiful to behold, whether from within or as a foreigner. During such moments, we are witnessing vertical invocations, pillars of ceremony connecting the robust particularity—the form and filigree—of Britishness, or Japaneseness, or Zuluness, to universal categories: auctoritas, grace, service, etc. We are seeing the nation: a generational, collective, work of art; the differentiated, archetypal expression of universal values.
Alas, we must nonetheless do so from the awareness that tradition (ceremony, flags, scepters, and altars) can both marshal and mollify society; summon to a just cause as well as sedate; rouse as well as erode. It all depends on how their representatives wield them and how the people receive them.
Esoterically, so to speak, the context in which these symbols occur does not matter—what they mean, truly and ultimately, is ever upright.
But exoterically they can function as an opiate, making us feel as though the ancient foundations remain, when they may in fact be tumbling.
Institutions can mean one thing even as they become the means for another.
When a traditional institution like monarchy oversees a period of thorough social transformation without protestation, like the one we have been living through, it may be the case that it is not merely standing idle. It may be, even in spite of the person wearing the crown, that the institution has come to function as just another part of the establishment whose social engineering we decry.
Of course, a coherent account of monarchy is not really compatible with the dystopian individualistic-collectivistic vision of the postmodern Left—but, then, neither is the patriotic, masculine protagonist of CCCP propaganda films with the morally-compromised subject that China’s surveillance, social-credit system is cultivating. A political class can always utilize symbols that are at odds with its own policies, not least because the population needs an escape valve, a plausible narrative with which to avoid having to dissent.
The dynamic whereby an institution means one thing de jure to those who understand its symbols, while de facto serving different ends, is easily parsed in the realm of international relations. Consider how a country’s traditions are invoked by the enemies of tradition in countries to which it is, or has been, a rival: ‘Bolivarian’ republican post-Marxists in South America, for example, are able to resent the Spanish monarchy even as they honor the British one. Similarly, but on the opposite side of the ideological spectrum, various center-right politicians in Spain have declared a mourning period for the late British monarch in the regions they govern, largely as a jab against the Left.
I do not mean to imply that a royal house is responsible for the use foreigners make of its image, only to draw attention to how a symbol can mean different things in different contexts. And if this functions geopolitically, it does so domestically as well: the prestige of a church, a state, or a national identity, can be appropriated to legitimize projects contrary to its own essential character. The enemy of a nation can wrap itself in the flag, just as surely as Christian injunctions to ‘judge not’ can be invoked to justify abortion, righteous indignation can be twisted to rally people behind an unjust war, and conservative notions of ‘order’ and ‘hierarchy’ can be called on to uphold the economic deprivation of a class of people.
The long-term survival of any traditional institution requires that, during historically critical moments, someone at or near its helm express the actual principles enshrined in that institution in terms that contrast straightforwardly with those that contradict it.
To the degree that European monarchies align themselves with prevailing global initiatives (such as those connected to the World Economic Forum and co.) and fail to signal against trends and policies that are leading to the collapse of the political enfranchisement and purchasing-power (not to mention birth rates) of their countries’ middle and working classes, they are failing the test of transformative times.
It is during these moments that an institution’s relevance, its moral leadership, its generational covenant with the nation it serves, may be renewed.
They will either repeat their founding moment, refresh their reason for being, or they will cease. In the latter case, even if they appear to endure, we will only be witnessing a shadowy afterimage, a living parody.
