I’m aware that any whiff of republicanism these days is
considered to be outside the bounds of good taste – we all love the royal
family now! I'm going to risk unpopularity and perhaps scandal by relaying these thoughts which recently occurred to me.
Private Eye’s recent front page headline, ‘Woman has baby,’ naturally
appealed to me but, although it points out an obvious truth about recent
events, it also misses the point. The
new baby is not only a human being; the tremendous fuss around his birth is a
reminder that he is part of one of the stranger British institutions – the monarchy. The monarchy is strange because it exists
within a democracy in which, notionally, sovereignty resides with the
people. Accordingly the queen (or king)
has no actual political power – just a stack of land and money accumulated over
the centuries, a generous taxpayer-funded remuneration package, guaranteed
access to the media, and regular one-to-one, confidential meetings with the
Prime Minister.
A few weeks ago, the courts rules that correspondence
between Prince Charles and various government departments could not be released
under the Freedom of Information Act as publication could damage his position
of political neutrality. The implication
was that Charles is not neutral, has clear political opinions and has taken
advantage of his position to communicate these to government ministers; keeping
his letters secret serves the purpose of maintaining the illusion of political
neutrality while allowing him to go about his business influencing government
policy.
You’d think that in a democracy people would notice this
kind of anomaly, not to mention the clash between their enthusiasm for these
symbols of privilege and the values we all supposedly believe in. The fact that hardly anyone does is less
surprising when you consider how shallow our democracy actually is and take
into account the centralisation of power, the inequality and the social
immobility which have increasingly come to plague us. (On the same subject, see the excellent book The
Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone). Public
worship of the monarchy shows how successful the institution is at implicitly
legitimising the status quo.
Next week we’ll be reading Parshat Shoftim (Deuteronomy 16:18
- 21:9) which, among other things, gives us the laws relating to the monarchy:
“If, after you have entered the
land that the Lord your God has assigned to you, and taken possession of it and
settled in it, you decide, "I will set a king over me, as do all the
nations about me," you shall be free to set a king over yourself, one
chosen by the Lord your God. Be sure to set as king over yourself one of your
own people; you must not set a foreigner over you, one who is not your kinsman.
Moreover, he shall not keep many horses or send people back to Egypt to add to
his horses, since the Lord has warned you, "You must not go back that way
again." And he shall not have many wives, lest his heart go astray; nor
shall he amass silver and gold to excess.
When he is seated on his royal
throne, he shall have a copy of this Teaching written for him on a scroll by
the levitical priests. Let it remain with him and let him read in it all
his life, so that he may learn to revere the Lord his God, to observe
faithfully every word of this Teaching as well as these laws. Thus he
will not act haughtily toward his fellows or deviate from the Instruction to
the right or to the left, to the end that he and his descendants may reign long
in the midst of Israel.” (17:14-20).
The important bit is not the Torah’s assumption that a king
will be predisposed towards the accumulation of excess wealth, immoral
behaviour and idolatry, nor the idea that the king has to be watched by the
priests to ensure he keeps to the laws of the Torah. The most interesting detail is the opening
word of the passage – ‘if.’ The Torah’s
message is, you can have a king if you want one, but you’ll probably be sorry
as this is far from the idea form of government.
Later (I Samuel chapter 8), we learn how the people rejected
the direct rule of God as represented by the Judges, and begged for a king so
they could be more like the other nations and have someone to lead them into
battle. The prophet Samuel, while
warning the people of the likely outcome, reluctantly agreed. The rest of the Bible describes how the
Israelite monarchy descended into exactly the sort of corruption warned about
in the Torah.
I would argue that the Bible is a republican document. It believes in the direct rule of God and
sees monarchy as a pragmatic solution designed to pander to the people, but one
which will inevitably lead to bigger problems than the ones it was designed to
solve. In our context, the monarchy has
no power to solve our problems, only the capacity to blind us to them. Yet direct rule by God is also unavailable to
us. In the absence of prophets, when we all
have equal potential for understanding God’s will (perhaps alternatively
understood as the common good?), is democracy the best available alternative to
biblical theocracy? The fact that the
people undeniably still want a king is another matter.
