With the accession of Charles III there has been, in some corners, those questioning the role of constitutional monarchy in this nation. The questions concern either the cost or the relevance of the institution as now constituted.
They that decry the cost of a head of state fail to notice that in democratic states the head of government, the, as it were, chief operating officer of the nation, and the head of state, its chief executive officer, may either be commixed or separated. In the Westminster parliamentary system of this country, the roles are separated. The chief operating officer, the prime minister, is the leader of the majority group in parliament. This allows for a system wherein the legislative agenda of government can act with relative speed and efficacy. If one looks to our neighbour to the south where the roles are united in a president who, if his agenda is to be implemented, requires both houses of congress to be in accord with his political vision and aspirations. It is a situation that is not common, and thus ever leading to legislative muddling and political mud-slinging. It is, especially in a two-party system, the formula for ineffectual governance—something the first president warned about sternly in his last public address. Thus, firstly, the system of government here established works quite well. Secondly, were the office of the monarch or the royal representative, the governor-general, to be ended, a replacement would still—by our system—be required. Name that position president, chieftain, or supreme ruler, it would matter not. There would still need to exist a position to deal with the ceremonials of state and international diplomacy and, more importantly with the intricacies of governance wherein parliament, as a legislative body, is itself under the umbra of tradition and law. That position would need to be financed. It needs to be noted, while every nation finances its head office, we do not pay the monarch; we pay the vice-regal officer, the governor-general. Thus, whatsoever the name given the highest position, there is a cost. The argument from fiscal responsibility is, therefore, moot. Also moot, in part, is the opinion that the head of state ought to be an appointed citizen of Canada. Since the middle of the last century, the throne, in the physical absence of the sovereign, has been chaired by a citizen of Canada appointed to act as viceroy, as governor-general.
The argument that the monarchy be replaced because it is a relic of colonialism, and that the role of chief executive officer be given to a citizen needs be addressed as two separate issues: colonialism, and the psycho-social importance of the continuity of person-as-symbol.
Colonialism is, for good or ill, the “buzz” word of the day. “Buzz” words, succinct rallying cries, have a place in coagulating the masses, but they, both in-themselves and in their effects, do not invite reflection. They are emotional cues—nothing more. They are meant to rally, not to call to rational and dispassionate analysis. They are meant to stir up attention to and action toward a goal. Whether the attention and/or the goal are focused, developed, thoughtful, or wholistic is not the concern. Thus, emotionally aroused, the mass rises up. There is excitement but no rationality. There is energy but no direction. It is a form of adolescent self-righteousness, full of steam and heat, and lacking in the discretion to see except in black and white, without the wisdom to comprehend the factuality of the world as the realm of greys wherein there is no amount of good without some tinge of evil, no effort that cannot be as equally critiqued negatively as positively. The world is a complexity that cannot be expected to run without flaw. Often that which is being critiqued was as emotionally and historically conditioned as the hue and cry now raised against it. We pride ourselves rational and civilized beings, but fail—often horridly so—to see how truly unthinkingly emotional and barbarian we are. Yes, cry out about injustice and wrongs past, present and to come, but before one eviscerates things past, before one drops the nuclear option, think about what of the past is at stake, think about the good tissue that might well be exscinded as one takes the scalpel to the cancer espied. Let us remember no state of being is perfect—be it the present state of an individual, the past or present or future of some nation-state. Perfection is not a human option. The issue is always whether or not the virtue of the individual, the institution, or of the nation-state outweighs its faults.
“Colonialism” is a bogus war cry. The world evolves by colonization. The Han dynasty so powerfully overtook the other peoples of China that the very name of Han became synonymous with “Chinese.” Rome took Latin culture and set it out to become something European. The potentates of Paris, London, Madrid, and Berlin all used their politically charged power to create nation-states. Are the Bretons, the Welsh, the Catalonians, the Bavarians totally suppressed by an overriding national identity? Not so much so that some from among each of these groups can on occasion cry out about their differences and distinctions. Cultural powers in the flowering of their political power connaturally erupt onto the world stage to spread their seed. It is a matter of bio-social evolution. Can that implantation be harsh and dismissive of the native soil and society it seeks “to evolve” in its biologic urge to procreate? Yes. Can it be perceived as a rape rather than a loving fertilization? Definitely. However, as something which is really more an unconscious rather than a conscious action, it is how the animal part of us works, how evolution works. They that think every land tread upon by European power was paradisiac, think again. European explorers merely superseded the autochthonous power plays of the lands they came to “civilize,” Europeanize, Christianize. The Mayan empire’s internal struggles for tribal domination fostered its self-destruction. The Aztecs, a hard-won confederation of peoples, eliminated the Mexica. The Iroquois had no pretentions about the destruction of the Hurons. The Blackfoot and the Nakota peoples were sought out by the Cree for subjugation. The sundry tribes we know as the Apache were not shy about spreading their sovereignty to the end that some etymologists suggest the name they carry is derived from the Zuni for “enemy.” The world is rarely a peaceable place wherein societies evolve in and by gentlemanly agreement. And thus saying, I must ask if the very word “gentlemanly” is not cause for some tirade against the politically or gender-specifically inappropriate. A “touchy” society, a society wherein everyone is on edge for some perceived hurt or injustice is not an enlightened society, merely one in which everyone is on edge about their feelings, their rights, their vision, and no one is looking at the bigger picture, at how we are where we are with benefits and blessings beyond the wounds and curses of the past. It is a society wherein everyone is over-compensating for being blindly self-absorbed and self-righteous. A harsh judgement? Yes. An accurate analysis of the mental, the psychic, state of the people? Yes. Living in a world paralysed by inaction in the face of looming global disaster, individuals retreat within, and scream out at the people and the ideas they feel they might get away with pillorying. Welcome to the world gone in-sane, a world acting out its absence of good health in body and in mind. We have, quite literally, lost our minds because we have lost our souls. We have denied soul and its value, de-spiritualized reality, and made for our selves a “material world,” and nothing more. The problem with a material world is this: it is breakable, end-able, and unconsciously that is exactly what we are in our tirades and tantrums manifesting.
This is why we need to rediscover the power of our symbols of church and state. They give the present the room, the scope, the soul-ful-ness, to encounter and to actualize the deeper powers resident within. It is the nature of constitutional monarchy that the sovereign function as a symbol of the history of the people standing above the passings configurations of that people and the politics that govern their evolving concerns and needs, failures and hopes. The sovereign does not rule, but reigns, that is, stands as a superimposed symbol of the whole of the people, past, present, future. The sovereign is the symbol of a history shared. He is not an ephemeral emblem, a revered thing. He is something more historically, something more personally authentic than a fluttering flag or a reverenced document of constitution. The sovereign is a living symbol of the living history of the people. As a living person, he is as human as the peoples and the history of those peoples, as open to abysmal failures as to soaring aspirations. Perfection is not here the issue. However, as a symbol the monarchy is, as all symbols are, something numinous, luminous. The sovereign is not an appointed officer of state, not the holder of a transient position but one from an historically conditioned continuum called to serve for life. The sovereign stands the beacon of historical solidity and continuity. Governments come and go. Issues arise and evolve. The sovereign remains and does so because in the monarchial role is stored the evolution of the nation. The emblematic crown personified in the person of the sovereign holds before us the processes of our coming together as a nation replete with misadventures, foibles, sins of omission and commission, grand gestures and adventures, blind spots and moments of illumination.
The numinous nature of this symbol of state is, not surprisingly, richly adorned. That which is extraordinary in life always is. Wedding planners are sustained by their ability to make every wedding a grandeur of flowers, food and finery. It is not then surprising that this numinous symbol of history and state be the occasion of history and state richly dizened and accessorized. It is not a celebration of an individual, but of a symbol. In this, it is to be noted the symbol stands above us, apart from us, its numinosity touching on something “divine.”
Symbols always stand above, apart, and in this they always have a tincture of the divine. They are pro-jects of the collective psyche intent upon exposing our selves to our selves, revealing the evolution of our selves to our selves. They are mirrors into our history and our collective potential. They seem apart because they are psychologically where we are not yet and yet need to be. They are above, elevated, enthroned on a height because they summon to our collective transcendence. They have a divine quality because the divine is always the backdrop of the creative, of the summons to creativity, self-honesty, self-affirmation. Thus, while the sovereign inherits sovereignty at the moment of his predecessor’s death, he needs still to be ritually “made” into the role. Yet, before he is thus made, before the crown is set upon him, he must first submit self before the altar of God, the ultimate symbol of unity. Then he is dressed in ancient mediatorial attire—a white robe, a priestly stole and cape. Hands, head, heart are anointed with sacred oil. Only when this consecration, this joining to the Holy, to the symbolic in its whole-ness, is complete is the crown placed over and upon him, and the ritual of enthronement above others effected. A person has been transformed until death into an icon of state and history. The sovereign is herein sealed into his role “by the grace of God.” In this, anointed and robed, he symbolically stands a mediatorial symbol upholding the ideal above the real, the identity and aspirations of the nation over the pragmatics of diurnal governance.
Given the creativity resident within the symbol, there resonates also within it a sense of paternity. The sovereign, silenced as to actual governance in his mediatorial aspect, is given to privately warn and advise the government, to, not rule, but to reign, to sove-reign, over the legislative governmental functions. The sovereignty, the “over-ruling” power, is the symbol-power of the historical continuity and the vision of the peoples over and above that of the pragmatics of politics and the daily press of governance. In this the sovereign person is constituted the silent icon—enduring, exemplative, inclusive. The symbol is always a silent power.
A person becoming a symbol is not an ordinary event. It is a rarity. Because of its divine tincture, its inherent “spirituality,” its psychic force, it is usually the great religious reformers that merit being seen as living symbols. Jesus as God’s Christ becomes for the believer a symbol of the heart of the psyche constantly evoking the emergence of individuality, personhood, wholeness, or in more religious terminology, the “image of the Father [Creator]” calling by the silent grace from within each the formation of a reflective, responsive, devotedly caring person. Yet, the cult of Jesus Christ is fading. The reasons why do not concern our investigations here. However, that cult, like to so many others has suffered literalism, and literalism excavates and desiccates the symbolic. Symbols, be they of the Christ or of the monarch, hold us together, cause us to look to the past, examine it, own it, understand it, and arise from it into the future fore-givingly, equitably, healthily, and well.
Because of its spiritual nature the symbolic is discounted in a society that has fallen into materialism. Unfortunately, take away the symbolic, the spiritually tinged aspects of reality, and matter is all with which one is left. Take away the “spirit” of a people by taking away their stories, their rituals, their language, their heritage and they are left de-spirited, left with only matter to fill the hole left. Thus, it is to material substances that they will turn for comfort, for some type of “on high” in substitution. An endless acquisition of things, alcohol and drugs, causes and conspiracies become ersatz spiritualities. They satisfy naught, and so fester ennui, despair, depravity, in-sanity. Symbols not only empower us, they make us, and they heal us.
Without a milieu of empowering symbols, some will seek out sub-cultures with their own histories, and so flourish wild attachments to teams and parties and issues. Still it is but a superficial connectivity cut off from and set against the history of the people as a whole. The superficial functions on the satiation of the moment. It is materialistic and pragmatic. Thus, when the civic question arises of preserving some monument or great structure of the past, the response is invariably to be rid of the financial burden of it. The sensitivity of history, for our shared history, is supressed in favour of being able to simply, simplemindedly, stoke the ego of one’s “little world” and ignore the call to something more too abruptly denounced as meaningless or elitist. The monarchy matters because we matter. It summons us to realize we are more than just material beings eating our way through a material world, subsisting on no more than the moment, the passing issue, and the whatsoever type of “high” such ego-soothing practicality, self-righteousness, or indignation can deliver.
The throne of Canada re-presents the history of this nation, the how and why of our coming together, our evolving com-munity of those settlers more ancient than the pyramids, the adventurers, explorers, merchants, scholars, and missionaries of a mere half millennium past, and the sundry and varied newcomers arriving daily to embrace this land as their home. The sovereign embodies our forged history with its wars and battles, treaties and accords, its judicial and legislative heritages of deep British and French roots, its too often neglected native ideas and ideals, our adventures and misadventures, our glories, and the not few errors and faults that we have survived, ought ever to strive to understand, and valiantly hope ever to work through and past.
It is in a person of historical continuity that the continuity of our history is embodied. That personal unity is itself symbolic of the factuality that all the history of this place is ours, and in that, that the king is ours. In this, as in the sovereign, whether our ancestors arrived 15,000 years ago or today, this land, this nation, is our home, our native land. It is the land of our birth as Canadians. Once we say this is our nation, we are enfolded into it, its history, its traditions, its institutions, its historical monarchy rising above the fleeting powers of governments, politics, and the ensuing ranks of bureaucrats and diplomats. It is not the British North America Act, nor is it the Constitution of 1982 that exemplify us a nation. They document the forging of a community of peoples. It is a living person who exemplifies, and therein psychologically can vivify us a living people rich in histories brought together in the abiding symbol of the sovereign.
Symbols reveal to us our past and our path forward. They matter for the life of us and ought not, therefore, be disregarded as antiques unfit for a modern age, mere relics of times past to, at best, be dragged out for a nostalgic occasion. That is exactly the attitude that deflates the symbol and robs a society of its socializing power. The constitutional monarchy of our historical heritage tells us we are more than the issues of today, more than any one aspect of this faction or this group. It tells us we are a living personal history symbolically encoded in a personal continuity of person. No flag, no sacred document can so encode our past, present and yet to be.
“God save the King!” is the exclamation we make to acknowledge our shared history and hopes, and to call down upon not only the sovereign but therein ourselves every felicity and goodly potency for life.
