Muhammad Ali said that a man who still thinks the same at 50 as he did at 25 has wasted 25 years of his life. Sadly, I know too many people who not only think at 50 as they did at 25, but at 25 thought much the same as they did at 15.
The great mystery, to me anyway, is why anyone would want to think like a 15 or 25 year old. As we now know from neuroscience, until roughly age 25 the human mind is very far from being able to make fully rational decisions. The youthful human brain thinks like a child and reasons like a child but is equally determined to put away what it perceives as childish things. Mostly, the unquestioned assumptions and beliefs with which it grew up.
Adolescence is, almost invariably, a time of rebellion and self-identity-forming (which is what makes teenagers such natural targets for Culture Wars groomers). The challenge is to put away adolescent things rather than let them become lifelong habits.
All of this is a long way of saying that my opinions and attitudes towards just about everything have changed, often radically, throughout my life. Climate change, socialism, left v right, you name it and my 15, 25, 40 and now 59-year-old selves would argue vociferously with one another, given the chance.
On few things more than on monarchism and theism.
I grew up in a world where God and Queen were more or less part of the background scenery. A necessary part of the setting perhaps, but something we rarely took much overt notice of. Every Monday morning at school assembly, we’d solemnly (sometimes, more often with schoolboy jocularity) swear to serve our country, God and the Queen. We obediently went to Sunday school, less obediently rioted through RI in real school, got through confirmation and were set free.
Still, that background scenery remained, and for the next few decades I paid mental lip-service, at least, to a kind of wishy-washy agnosticism. Unlike my uber-Boomer eldest brother, who became a loud and obnoxious atheist. When my own kids came along, I followed the prescription given by a philosopher friend (a real one – philosopher, that is – with a doctorate and everything): raise the kids the way we were, with a laissez-faire religious upbringing, Sunday school, confirmation and all and then let them make up their own minds.
Almost immediately the kids were confirmed, though, the New Atheists landed. For a time, I was as beguiled as any edgy teenager with a social media account and a copy of God is Not Great. Freed, as I saw it then, from the constraints of having to pretend for the sake of the kids, I became a full-on, religion-bashing, annoying old little shit.
But the fire of the New Atheists soon burned out. I began to see the essential hollowness of their world-view. First to go was Daniel Dennett: having particularly focussed on Philosophy of Mind in my own studies, I soon began to suspect that the Great Man was, frankly, full of it. The core of Dennett’s thinking is the sort of reductionist view of the human mind that should have died with Behaviourism in the middle ’60s (the one really laudable achievement of Noam Chomsky’s career).
Sam Harris followed soon after. The Moral Landscape, I realised, was half of a good book, ruined by a narrow Scientism. When Harris published Waking Up, those scales, too, fell. Here was a thinker who’d made his name railing against religion, spouting the same faux-Buddhist claptrap I could hear from any stoner who’d, like, seen God, man. When, a few years later, Harris succumbed to the looniest Trump Derangement Nonsense imaginable, any pretense that here was a deep thinker went out the window.
Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, at least, retain some of my respect. Hitchens, while clearly a mind to be reckoned with, had clearly allowed himself to be poisoned by an irrational biliousness where religion was concerned. By contrast, his often-derided brother, Peter Hitchens, came across as a much more nuanced and, by the standards of today, truly radical thinker.
Dawkins, to his credit, has latterly come to grant Christianity a modicum of respect as a ‘fundamentally decent’ religion, to the point that Dawkins now publicly identifies as a ‘Cultural Christian’. Well, fair enough – but that, I came more and more to realise, is a pretty hollow proposition: the wishy-washy, I-Can’t-Believe-It’s-Not-Butter approach to religion that blights so much of the Anglican church.
Still, I can’t be too hard on Dawkins: for a while, I’d bought the same featherlight guff myself. As I shucked off the dead weight of New Atheism, and, more importantly, began to see the devastation that the abandonment of Christianity was wreaking on the West, I, too, subscribed to the idea that we could keep the scenery of Christianity even as we pointed out to the audience that it was all just wood, canvas and paint.
But if we’re truly serious about saving the West, cultural Christianity just won’t cut it. Christianity is the core of Western culture, if we want to save Western culture, we must save Christianity. We can’t do so by just going through the motions, like someone snoring through mass. Christianity can only live as a religion if we believe in it.
And that was the problem with cultural Christianity, I never really believed it. Like Elijah, after the fire of New Atheism, a small, still voice remained. That voice, that nagging doubt that God really was God, could never quite be silenced by the whirlwind of intellectual arrogance. Ever since I was a teenage art student whose teacher loaned a massive book of Gustave Doré’s engravings, I had always been captivated by his illustration for Genesis 32 of Jacob wrestling the angel.
Here, it always seemed to me, was the quintessence of the struggle between faith and doubt. I rather suspect that Esoterica’s Dr Justin Sledge is correct when he says that the Ancients were in many ways wiser than we and captured in their stories timeless lessons that we ignore at our peril.
So, the still, small voice nagged away. I re-evaluated Blaise Pascal’s famous wager, which had always seemed to me a rather lame attempt at proving the existence of God, which was because I had misunderstood what Pascal was really saying. Pascal never, in fact, claimed to prove the existence of God. What he argued, instead, is that it is better to believe in His existence.
Unfortunately, Pascal frames it as a rather transactional belief (something which, on re-reading Genesis, the wily Jewish patriarch Abraham, who endlessly bargains with God, would probably rather have approved of). Still, the essential wisdom of Pascal’s wager remains: we cannot know for sure (in this life, at least) if God exists, but we are better off acting as if He does.
Pascal frames the payoff of the wager as arriving in the afterlife but it seemed more and more to me that the payoff comes very much in this one, too. When I considered those whom I knew who lived what I would call a truly Christian life – as opposed to a life of priggish, Bible-thumping moralism – it was clear that their faith had paid endless dividends in their lives.
Who was I to gainsay them? As Dr Sledge also says, one of the beauties of faith, too, is that it puts us in our place. He wears the kippah, he says, not to advertise to the world that he is Jewish, but to remind himself that he stops there. There is always something above him. That sort of ego death-blow, we may suspect, explains much of the New Atheist bile in an egocentric culture like the modern West. And puts things in their rightful place, too, much of the reason for my re-evaluation of the merits of constitutional monarchy versus republicanism.
Although, in school, we robotically repeated the oath of allegiance, at home, my rusted-on Labor-voting family made republicanism an article of faith. Gough was King and the Queen was an outdated figurehead. I dutifully voted Yes in the 1999 Republic referendum, even though I thought that the model on offer was terrible.
It was only years after the referendum that I realised that the model on offer, while terrible, was no worse and a good deal better than some of the alternatives. If nothing else, as a lawyer friend pointed out to me, the challenge of moving our legal system from the Crown to a Republic was far more complicated and expensive than the Republic-embiggeners ever wanted to admit.
More importantly, I realised what Mark Steyn put so eloquently: the beauty of the Commonwealth system of parliamentary monarchism is that the ultimate power is not only practically powerless, but physically absent most of the time. Yet, that ultimate power remains. The monarch can, ultimately, dismiss a government. In Australia’s case, acting on the advice of the Crown’s local representative, it actually has.
So, every Australian Government must remember that there is always someone above them. Like the observant Jew’s kippah, the Crown says to even the most egoistic prime minister: You stop here.
This doesn’t imply any particular fondness for the monarch of the day, of course. King Charles seems a rather batty, if well-meaning enough, old fool. Every family having one, as it were, both one of his brothers and one of his sons seem far worse. As was his great-uncle. But it’s the system which matters: the monarchy is bigger than the monarch.
Republicans carp and moan about the ‘archaic’ idea of hereditary power, but that’s to rather miss the point. After all, the great paradox of power is that those who seek it the most assiduously are most often the least suited to wield it. An hereditary monarch doesn’t seek power, but is forced to accept it and whether they want it or not: I suspect Charles would much rather tend to his gardens than to matters of state. But he doesn’t have a choice.
Neither will his son and grandson – and that’s another point in favour of constitutional monarchy. Prime ministers come and go. They strut and fret their hour upon the parliamentary stage and then retire on their fat pensions. So it doesn’t matter, in the end, how badly they screw the job: they still get their pension and their party eventually gets back into power. Like an ’80s corporate raider, they have no real interest in keeping the firm going. They’ll collect their golden handshake no matter how much ruin they leave in their wake.
A monarch has no such luxury. They perforce have to think ahead, for their children, grandchildren and so on. A monarch bearing the name Charles must be as aware as anyone that many a revolution has dethroned a monarch. Often bloodily. If a monarch wants to pass the crown onto his or her descendants, he or she must strive to preserve the kingdom as best they can.
Republicans like to blatherskite that a republic will show that we have ‘grown up as a nation’. I say the exact opposite.
Learning to accept a monarch on Earth is like learning to accept the monarch in Heaven: it’s a constant, humbling reminder that there’s always something bigger than us.
