Recently, Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex and his wife Meghan said they were stepping back from their duties as “senior royals.”  This has caused a stir and appears to be a major fissure oozing out ages of monarchical rule. It reminds me of the English ballad A World Turned Upside down. This was the ditty that Lord Cornwallis played as his soldiers marched out of Yorktown to surrender to a bunch of upstart colonials.

Our  Lords and Knights, and Gentry too, doe mean old fashions to forgoe:
They set a porter at the gate, that none must enter in thereat.
They count it a sin, when poor people come in.

In today’s more democratic political climate the word conservative base or liberal base is being bandied about  like a shuttlecock across a net in a badminton game.  As this political shuttlecock flies it leaves a trail of conservative or liberal vortices  that float invisibly down towards center court where the masses, the middle or the silent majority look up to see the little birdy fluttering by. In American politics it is said that elections are won, much like in chess, by controlling the center.  I think that this a mistaken myth. It is a myth right up there with “toads cause warts.”

For centuries people lived in  kingdoms, empires that were under the rule of some sort of paternal ruling elite whose real aim was to hold onto power and more than likely gave little thought to the masses in the middle and what they thought. It was a “let them eat cake” attitude. So when a pair of “royals” walk away from the castle much like his great uncle, King Edward VIII did for the love of a woman, it is a big deal. To rule over a nation as a king or a queen is considered a godly duty.

In the  ancient kingdoms Pharaohs were gods.  The Greeks took the gods and made them as human as possible while putting them high on Mount Olympus.  The key to success in ancient Greece was don’t piss off the gods. The Romans took a different twist to it and made their human emperors divus or divine upon their death.  This also included family members.

Then the ancient  Hebrews changed things up with believing in one God. I guess maybe when they  were tired of being ruled by a mish-mash of judges they demanded of God  the need for  one king.  The prophet Samuel asked them are you sure about this?  Think about it this before I hit send. Saul was God’s “anointed one” way back in 1000 BCE. This is a different take on the king being god. Saul was never a god but appointed by God.

Saul, however, did not work out to well for the Israelites. Maybe from that time on people believed in the divine right of kings, that kings and the ruling elites were the anointed ones. What other justification could there be? But jumping ahead 3,000 years it becomes a huge leap of faith believing somebody like  Friedrich Wilhelm Viktor Albert, a Hohenzollern, was divinely authorized to be King of Prussia and Emperor of Germany. Those who believe in the fallibility of a supreme being have a good argument on the process of picking a ruler.

So, Europe at the beginning of the 20th Century finds itself in family way.   Here is the first grandchild of Queen Victoria, an heir apparent simply because his mother was the eldest daughter of the Queen — a product of selective breeding. Cambridge Dictionary defines selective breeding as the “process of choosing only plants and animals with desirable characteristics to reproduce.” This may be a good way to improve wheat yields but there has to be better ways picking a leader. When it comes to royal inbreeding it is hard to make this definition stand up. What were the desirable characteristics gleaned from Wilhelm?

What makes this generational transfer of power even more absurd is the future Kaiser of Germany, when he was a little tike,  was also sixth in line of succession to the British throne. And to throw a massive wrinkle into this divinity belief, the Kaiser was third cousin to Czar Nicholas of Russia, who was also first cousin to George the V of England who was also first cousins to Willy and Nicky. It would be unfair to blame the three cousins for the carnage of World War I but one has to wonder what a Thanksgiving Dinner would have been like with all of them gathered around the festive table of Europe instead of entrenched for four years on a battlefield.

And simply put, there were no way to popularly remove any of these incompetent divinely mandated rulers. There were no midterm elections. It was up to God. Any attempt by a mere mortal to do so  was a at least a treasonable  offense at worst a major offense against God. In less legalistic eras the poor misguided miscreant attempting to undo God’s work could end up in a quick trip to the Tower, or a deep dungeon on the rack, possibly being drawn and quartered or some other sort of gruesome public execution. Followed by an even quicker condemned trip to hell.

Using a divinely authorized form of picking world leaders can end up badly. I can only imagine God, hand to forehead, saying to himself, “not again.” This played out in the Balkans in June of 1914 when a ticked-off nineteen year-old  Bosnian Serbian, Gavrilo Princip, decides to negate a heavenly mandate by killing Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Ferdinand’s death, the Habsburg heir to the the already dying Austrian Hungarian empire, plunged Europe into fours years of trench warfare resulting in more than 20 million dead. The end result for two of the three cousins is they lose everything: Nickolas his life and Wilhelm is forced into exile and disappears to history altogether.   The Habsburgs, like the ruling Romanovs in Russia, lose  their  500 years of family rule in four years.  As ruling elites they placed themselves and their families above the common man and law.

In previous eras of institutional religious mysticism, getting the uneducated to believe that “God” put a certain family in power for generations was an easy sell. Take Papal rule, for example, the Conti Family, and they may have no  affiliation with any New York mob, had four members of its family to reign as heir to Saint Peter in Rome.  The Medici and the Orisini families each had three popes each to sit on the Vatican throne of the Catholic Church. This was a time before mass communication. A time when heretical thoughts could get person excommunicated at best tortured at worst. The Church controlled social media with various feast days, religious obligations and indulgences. Any person straying from the flock could possibly find themselves in a visit to the Inquisitor General’s office for reeducation.

And woe to those who begged to challenge certain dogmatic beliefs embedded into the conservative core faith and doctrine of the time. Much like today’s scientific evidence about climate change, the Catholic Church stood  firmly behind the geocentric model that the Earth is the center of the universe. Scientist like Copernicus and Galileo turned the conservative world upside down, inside out and all around with scientific observations that shifted the Earth from  the center of the known world.  However, this did not hinder the Church. In 1616 the Catholic Church went full in on the geocentric belief and declared that any yammering about heliocentrism, the Sun being the center of the universe was simply heresy.

Unfazed with possibility of torture for espousing heretical nonsense, Galileo published Dialogue Concerning the two Chief World Systems in 1632.  Galileo had already been warned once for his heliocentric views back in 1616. Dropping two differently weighted cannon balls from the Leaning Tower of Pisa to see which would land first was one thing, but Earth going around the Sun was a cannon ball  gone too far. Besides, nobody likes a loose cannon, a know-it-all . Despite  the growing scientific evidence to support his claims, Galileo was convicted of heresy in 1633 and sentenced to life imprisonment.  Fortunately, he served his sentence under house arrest dying in 1642.

This sort of heresy still exists today.  In 2017, then Governor of Florida, Rick Scott , banned state agencies and contractors from using the terms “global warming” and “climate change.” in state documents. According to The Guardian,  “In 2017, he approved Florida’s so-called “anti-science law”, which critics say was aimed at allowing legal challenges to the teaching of the realities of climate change and global warming in the state’s classrooms.” Pope Urban VIII’s logic lives on, in theory.

In Galileo’s case, the conservative efforts could not keep his ideas under house arrest. They could claim that these ideas were heresy but not fake. Today it can be argued that climate change is fake but Florida, with 8,436 miles of coastline, and the highest point being 312 feet above sea level,  is subjected to all sorts of tidal changes from storm surges to saltwater intrusion. Banning a phrase is not going to hold back the Atlantic Ocean any more than it will change the positions of the Earth and the Sun.

 

The state of conservative ruling elites, and let me be clear I am not  just talking about politics and religion or our conceptual beliefs on liberalism or conservatism. The real trend is that conservative ideology tends to hang on more and eventually rolls back liberal principles. In 1792 the French National Convention, a product of the French Revolution, banned the monarchy. In 1793 they executed the king  for treason.  Twenty-three years later France brings back a new king to the throne. Granted, France was not the same and without a doubt some liberal changes  of “liberty, equality, fraternity” stuck.

Today, we are bombarded with legalistic, economic and political mantras.  Liberal chants like “free college tuition” or “medicare for all” that get quickly branded as socialism, a condition worse than the plague. But somehow we buy into “money is free speech”  or economic concept “to big to fail.” In response to the Great Recession the federal government passed a variety of banking laws to check the greed of various banking interests.  Most of those laws have either been repealed or eviscerated. The government  gave out more than $400 billion to various banks and corporations to keep them afloat. And yes, most of this money was paid back.  But could you imagine if  our government would have taken Marie Antoinette’s advice and handed out some of that cake to the middle. Even if they would have distributed a fraction of that money, say one-fourth directly into the hands of the middle it would have proved  a favorite conservative mantra of the 1980s  that “a rising tide lifts all boats.”

These modern day conservative myth, some  validated by the  Supreme Court, others beaten into our  brains by political pundits and yammering talking heads, are foisted upon us much like the god-driven Medieval monarchical chant of “divine rights of kings” and the Earth is the center of our little corner of the universe seems absurd.  Unlike the past, watching the today’s shuttlecock fly over the net from one-side-to-the-other keeps the majority of the people believing that they are in the game.  Are they? Or is it still more of a family affair.

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