Sorry, all you naysayers – a royal wedding is still very relevant today
The celebration was that rare beast, an occasion that we could share and take pride in as a nation
It’s what the Elizabethans would have called an excess of spleen. Even as millions of Britons were putting up bunting, preparing picnics or making cardboard crowns, a determined minority was holding anti-monarchist conventions, writing angry articles and posting online about how stupid it all was. Some naysayers boasted of their indifference to the royal wedding to send a signal about their sophistication. Others denounced it to show off their egalitarian credentials. Instead of admiring their pluck,
I felt sorry for them.
It’s not that I expected everyone to be gripped by paroxysms of joy. Some people enjoyed the spectacle by giggling at the perturbed expressions on royal faces during the sermon given by Bishop Michael Curry. Plenty of others just weren’t interested, and that’s fine. But it takes a special sort of resentment to air bitter thoughts about someone else’s wedding day. Snobby journalists wrote proudly that they didn’t “give a damn” and poured scorn on the coverage.
Labour MP Emma Dent Coad used the event to argue that royal institutions are outdated in a modern, democratic state. This is entirely wrong. National celebrations such as the royal wedding are still relevant and, in fact, more valuable now than ever because they are so lamentably rare. What other events can we meaningfully claim to share as a nation?
Churchgoing, anthem-singing and BBC radio audiences are in decline. There are sports competitions like football or the Olympics, or TV programmes, such as Blue Planet or The X Factor. There are Christmas holidays, pub lunches, general elections and a tendency to mock the French. There are the moments when we grieve together or come under attack, from terrorists or Russian spies. And there are attempts to create new markers of identity, like St George’s Day – greeted with characteristic scorn by many on the Left. Overall, though, the pace of technological and demographic change has thrown us into a state of constant cultural flux, eroding the sense of belonging that puts a nation at ease with itself.
This week, at a dinner hosted by an alliance of European Eurosceptics, I heard the Flemish conservative politician Bart De Wever describe this malaise taking hold across our continent. Our schoolchildren walk along the grandiose streets of our ancient cities, he said, and look at their palaces and churches in the same way that we look at cave paintings: without knowing why they were built or what they’re for. Yet these very institutions, along with Britain’s man-made geography of drystone walls, spacious green parks and bare Scottish moors, should form part of the glue that keeps us together, marks out this island as home and lets us absorb new peoples and influences with confidence.
Sometimes, that’s exactly what happens. It should be a source of pride that so many of us watched the St George’s Chapel choir, founded in 1348, perform alongside the Kingdom Choir, a gospel choir founded in 1994. It should make us happy that our military commemorations now include laying wreaths at a monument to the Gurkhas, whose contribution was ignored for so long. And even the dilapidated Palace of Westminster can still excite the “respect, awe and pride” described by Kemi Badenoch, the Nigerian-born Tory MP, as she finds herself walking the same corridors as her political heroes, like Margaret Thatcher and Winston Churchill.
Yet technology is denuding these physical and intuitional facts of their meaning. Geography – being here, on this street, in this city, on this island – should be the ultimate common basis for a community. But, as Ms Badenoch put it recently, it’s possible to meet young British Muslims who feel more of an affinity with a co-religionist living thousands of miles away than with their neighbour next door.
It’s possible to meet pro-european activists who say proudly that they have more in common with university graduates in Gdansk than workingclass people living a mile across town.
These new, international connections can be a force for good. But often they replace the sense of meaning that comes from shared physical space with something abstract and ultimately insufficient for the soul. These “global fetishes”, as the philosopher Roger Scruton puts it, suppose that a country can exist as a political unit without the crucial ingredients of “trust, attachment and safety”. Many think, wrongly, that the idea of a nation is obsolete and racist.
This is, of course, exactly the mistake that underlies political projects such as the euro and communism. It assumes that the world can be arranged entirely according to principles derived from self-conscious reason. It ignores the ineffable, instinctive aspects of human experience. Humans’ sense of belonging, solidarity and pride don’t come from the head. They come from the heart and the gut.
That is why national pride and the few rituals that still reinforce it are such remarkable things. They cannot be logically designed or implemented. And yet they are what allows me, an Ashkenazi Jew, to read the history of England and feel successively sad about the decimation of the ancient Britons by the Saxons, the destruction brought on the Saxons by the Danes and then the subjugation of the Saxons by the Normans. It doesn’t “make sense” that I care, except in my gut. Far from being an intrinsically racist creation, the nation is a cosmopolitan idea that helps me and others to transcend the politics of bloodlines and feel at home on this island.
The royal wedding is one of the few events that reinforces that feeling across a huge swathe of society. I’ve seen it celebrated by urban homeless women and rural aristocrats. The determination to dismiss it by joyless naysayers reminds me of a moment in the service held during a Jewish Passover. In discussing the ceremony, which commemorates the Hebrews’ escape from slavery in Egypt, there are four questions asked by four kinds of child, one wise, one simple, one wicked and one who does not know how to ask. It is the “wicked” child who comes to mind.
He asks: “What are all these things to you?” By this question, the child deliberately shuns the collective ritual, implying that it has no meaning for him, even if others may partake. The text instructs an answer: “If someone should cut himself off from the community, make him eat his words, saying: ‘I do this because of what God did for me. For me, but not for you. For, had you been there, you would not have been redeemed.’”
Or, as the modern internet would put it: “U ok, hun?”