The Tyranny of Tidiness

With your host, Lewis Holden.

Lewis has some very good points in his responses to my posts which I have not yet addressed. This is quite deliberate, there are three or four posts in my Monarchist jeremiad to go yet, and I hope to get to at least some of the points he is making. Panic not, I do not attempt to slay the world in one post.

Lewis's response, which you can read by clicking on his name, seems to me to cut to the heart of the issue which divides us, and so I post on it without further delay, despite promising not to.Mr. Holden exhibits his undoubted intellect, and the debating training which we never doubted by labelling my last post a "squirrel". This itself is a well-known debating technique, as Dr. Swift knows, for he has used it: give the opponent's argument a nasty technical label, and you are half-way to winning it. (If that fails, try the Bill Wilmot technique of labelling the debater, although if you do adopt this, Dr. Swift advises better spelling).

The key paragraph for me in Lewis's response is this one:

But we are neither Marxists nor anarchists;

[Yet another example of debating training; accuse your opponent of saying something he not only did not say, but explicitly denied. This is completely irrelevant to the remainder of the post, but Dr. Swift could not let it go past without tipping his shovel hat to an intelligent opponent.]

Where we disagree with monarchists is on the issue of how the pinnacle of the hierarchy gains their office how our head of state gains their position.

Bingo. Or, to be more accurate, we disagree on which methods of appointment are legitimate. At the back of this disagreement, are, in my view, two differing conceptions of the State, and the natural structure of government.Mr. Holden exalts freedom of choice. He maintains that governments derive their authority from the consent of the governed, and he would say that the democratic process is the legitimate way by which that consent is manifested. If I have mischaracterised his position, I invite him to correct me.

I do not disagree that "consent" is required, but I see the State in less contractual terms than that. Following Roger Scruton in The Meaning of Conservatism (which book I recommend to Mr. Holden), I say that consent does not have to be elective. We do not choose our families. It is ridiculous to say that we give up certain of our rights by consent to secure certain privileges, because we don't. Families are built on a bond which is much deeper than a simple contract, and on a differing sort of authority which derives its power only from the fact that it is recognised.

Likewise, there are other customs and conventions which exert power over our thinking and our actions, simply because we recognise their authority. The sacred turf, at Christ's College, for example, which is sacred because it is considered to be so. Opening a door for a woman. Standing on the bus for an elderly person. There is no reason that we should do these things, but we feel we ought to do them, and that custom and convention excercises authority over us only to the extent that we recognise it.

Anyone who has lived in a village, as Dr. Swift has, can testify that there are dozens of conventions and agreements in community life (Don't walk on the grass verge. Don't touch the roses in Mrs. Brown's garden. Tip your hat, take your hat off inside, cross yourself, don't cross yourself, shout "Amen!", let Mrs. Aldrige have the first cup of tea, don't push in line, lower your voice, don't touch that.....) which are not voted upon at all. They are simply upheld by common consent as the sort of thing we do here. The Common Law is a very good example of the sort of thing I mean; a thicket of precedents and individual decisions which together make up a united whole.

To me, the State is a village, with its own conventions and customs. With Montesquieu, (The original populariser of Mr. Holden's notion of a "crowned republic", although what he said after that seems neglected), I say that what he called the "courtesy", or the custom which upholds the Monarchy is an absolutely valid way of giving consent. It is tacit consent, but consent none the less. The Hereditary Principle rests upon this customary basis. We don't vote, or opt-in to our Head of State, but in a thousand different ways, we consent to her continued reign.It is, no doubt, possible to abolish custom in favour of theoretical abstractions. It is possible to hew down the thicket in order to plan and plot the perfect Constitution on the grounds of ideology.

This is what Mr. Holden does regularly, trying to plan the new republic like pieces of a jig-saw. And, to do him justice, he does a careful and thorough job of making his case. But I repeat Mr. Burke's insight that we do not "frame a government". We inherit one, in all its messy humanity, and we must then decide what we ought to do with it. I think that even though a republic might be ideologically tidier, we ought to leave the village alone. He thinks things ought to be tidied up for our own good. This is one of the differences between us.

I expect Mr. Holden to say that the customs we inherit are not our own, and we have new ideas reflective of our identity. He might even quote that excruciating parallel with the kauri again. I'll look at the idea of New Zealand identities, true and false, in a future post.