God save the queen?

We had been playing with the idea of getting dual citizenship, adding a New Zealand passport to our American one – I’ve always thought it would be so cool to carry multiple passports. Besides, we could go to Cuba, and who knows when the plane we are travelling on might get high-jacked, in which case it would be an advantage to be carrying a kiwi rather than American passport.

But then came the explosion of debate on the British royalty brought on by the Royal Wedding, and it suddenly occurred to me that to become citizens we would have to raise our right hands and pledge allegiance to the queen. (Actually, the exact expression used in the oath, it turns out, is “honour” the queen.)

Let’s think about this. Because if you are not the sort of person who raises your hand to swear to whatever, in other words, if you have any principles at all and are not a feeble piece of crap total loser ready to denounce your neighbor for a dollar, this can only mean that you accept the premises of the monarchy.

True, the internet is filled with nauseating and half-assed defenses of the monarchy from people who do not believe in it. Bizarrely, loads of Brits are willing to maintain the wacky institution as good for tourism or because it “holds the country together.” Mark Vernon writes on his blog that the “mystery of the monarchy is that it holds all sorts of things for us that other political systems struggle to do. A modern monarchy speaks of the pre-political values necessary for democracy, values like charity and trust, and which the modern royal dignifies in his or her day job. These can't be voted in, and they are not rational.” Vernon attributes this ability of the queen to serve as a sort of social glue for the irrational to the fact that she is “symbolic” and therefore capable of encompassing contradictory values. Let’s be clear about this: as Vernon admits, the queen is just a cipher upon which to project pretty much anything. But you don’t get to create a society around what you freely admit to be a cipher. In fact, if everyone came out and agreed that the monarchy is a benign collective fantasy, the whole thing would collapse. The system presents itself as a reality; the queen IS the queen. Her queenship is itself as a predicated on the assumption that some people are better than others by virtue of genealogy. It isn’t as if she could get on TV, wink and say, “We all know that this is a bunch of horse shit, but it’s good for tourism, so I’ll pretend to be your queen and you pretend to be my subjects.” Either she is the queen or she isn’t, and those capable of demystifying royalty and still wanting to keep her around are either morons or cynics.

We how believe in republics rather than monarchies rally around fantasies, too, around various values and offices, as Vernon not very insightfully points out. But the difference is that under no circumstances are we asked to believe that we are distinguishable on the basis of our blood. We have been through the Enlightenment, and we have been warned by the Dialectic of Enlightenment of the necessity of myth in our everyday lives to keep horrors like Hitler and his nutty mythology at bay. Still, the point is that we are never asked to swear that we believe in our own myths. We are asked to accept a set of values, a set of ideals, but when we raise our right hands we are asked only whether we will uphold the law. On the other hand, the myth of the monarchy demands our assent to an insane fantasy that some blood is more valuable than others. Most of the time here in New Zealand this nutty idea lingers in the background, emerging occasionally on TV in the form of a royal wedding. I can live in this country (although I do it under protest). But I will not volunteer to become a subject of the queen of England. My God, what would be left? The British monarchy is a totalizing system of belief. Anyone who subjects oneself to it has to believe in it: that, or admit to living in a strange world of half light and fantasy, or, even worse, to having no beliefs at all.