power – GV Loewen

The Reign in Spain (falls mainly on the king)

After having survived a quite literal mudslinging, Spain’s monarch must also have just as literally encountered the very ground of his rule. The sovereign, as a social role, is both the body politic and the territory, the land, whereupon his subjects rusticate. Bataille’s political sociology remains the best take on an anthropological history of the idea of the sovereign, but today we understand a ruler whose role is both archaic and even anachronistic to, perhaps with irony, work to get back to his earthy roots. A monarch today represents the people over against the government and other interests. They are a relatively free agent, apparently apolitical but not non-political, symbolic of a set of values of which all are supposedly supportive. Today, the list of such values which can be represented in this old-world manner is likely much shorter than it had been in the past, but we cannot be sure of this, mainly due to the fact that historic records are not only penned by the privileged, the literate, the cultured, but also preserved by them. We have an official line, prevalent in all types of history known by us, to the threshold that it would not be an exaggeration to imply that all history is, to a great extent, official history.

The sovereign was, however, not originally an historical figure at all. The position was an Aufhebung, not only propelled to the apex of the societal pyramid, but floating above that point. Like the third eye of the Masonic lore, it was held in space by its divine assignation in feudalism, by its being perceived as the worldly source of Mana in traditional societies, or by its having secured a rather happenstance superiority in resource access and distribution, as in early irrigation civilizations. Held in space by the otherworld, and conversely, held in place by our shared world over which the sovereign presided but also must exempt himself from, the ruler’s rule is one shot through with distanciation. Today, of course, the remaining monarchs have come down to earth, with the date of 1688 being important to that regard. 1789 would not have been possible without the movement from monarch to parliament. Yet it is 1789 and not 1688 which allows us to become nostalgic for the monarchy and, in regions where such persons yet exist, such as Spain, imagine that the sovereign has a populist responsibility, an authentic obligation to ‘the people’ which, in turn, is the only thing that authenticates his existence as well as the continued existence of the role itself.

Just as we have made God a fellow traveller, so the sovereign must also fall into that same worldly line. Lineage is now part of an antiquarian, even a dilettantish or yet Whiggish, history, and nothing more. A royal genealogy may be romantic, but it gives the current title-holder no moral purchase upon how responsible one is or what responsibilities one has. And the personalization of religion, which is easier to shoulder than that of politics due to the abstract and essential quality of the divine, is both a practice-run at making leadership itself worldly, as well as a hedge. The nautical phrase, ‘having one anchor out to windward’ applies to modern religion, especially Protestantism, in that we can still claim belief. We speak to a personalized godhead but we still have faith that someone is listening to us. Our relationship with sovereignty is muddier than this.

Apropos, today’s monarchs are philanthropists in every sense of the term. They work for charitable organizations, they lend their status to benevolent causes, they labor on behalf of non-governmental organizations, they travel the world for the cause of surface diplomacy – nothing important actually ‘gets done’ on such junkets; monarchs do not negotiate the brass tacks of contemporary geopolitics – and they make appearances at arts and cultural events. They are taxed by their abstract origin; they must appear to be everywhere at once. To be seen but not heard in this overtaxed manner makes the sovereign into a young child. The monarch has no voice in any case, and to ‘blame’ him for his nation’s woes, natural or cultural it matters not, is to mistake both his person and his role. In the capacity of the former, he is like any of the rest of us, covered in mud by mudslides, suffocating to death if in the wrong place at the wrong time. As to the latter, the monarch has no political power, no Realpolitik, if you will. And while many of us have imagined, perhaps as children ourselves, that it would be a lark to fling mud at a king no less, the act is itself symbolic, participating in that near-primordial order of affairs where the sovereign’s very being is lived on the land through and by myself.

This same land had betrayed its people, murdering them ruthlessly and anonymously. Ergo, the king had demonstrated that self-same betrayal. This was no mere matter of sympathetic magic; the sovereign is the land as well as is the people, and so in him, through a natural disaster, an internecine conflict occurred. The Lisbon earthquake was interpreted by some as evidence for the absence of God in the world. The world had, in that case, betrayed itself, shuddering to its foundations the culture that had grown from it, shaking in its essence with the parturition from the source of its own creation. There is no Erda in our contemporary narrative. Wisdom comes not from the earth but rather from the greater cosmos, the only remaining presence that can mimic both the distanciated being of the divine and its royal representative, as well as the abstract quality of the moral Mana necessary to keep everything in its static place. Just so, all populist politicians, none of them remotely royal or abstract, claim to be ‘the anointed’ – a recent report had one Trump follower referring to him using that exact phrase – and if one is loyal to them, they shall return the earth to its former order. The ‘again’ of these slogans is what is truly disturbing about them, not the idea of greatness.

But Bataille reminds us that an authentic sovereign had no need to make claims of any kind. Just as the one who possesses what possesses her, the person of faith, the one who has no need to express or expound that faith to others – her acts alone speak the voice of the greater being, which is why some faiths refer to them as ‘works’; a direct nod to the sense that the divine ‘works’ through us – the sovereign acts without having to take action, utters without speaking, works without laboring. No mere politician can accomplish any of these things, but neither should they try to do so. Self-sacrifice is the lot of the modern leader, for she remains a person even when occupying her lead role. Not only was the sovereign never a self, he had no personal relationships. The people were his embodied action in the world, the land his deeper hearth. ‘The world is deep’, Nietzsche intones, the seriousness of Zarathustra’s ‘Midnight Song’ given an oddly fitting sanctity and transcendence by Mahler setting it into his Third Symphony. Yes, the world is deep. Yet we have today chosen to live only upon it, and not within its embrace. This, for the mythologist, is the truer source of the climate crisis and the overuse of our shared ecosystem.

Divorced from the earth, our leaders no longer ‘earthly’ in that ancient sense but rather entirely worldly, we must alone confront the sheer scale of anonymous natural forces which can suddenly impinge upon our existence. The ‘natural’ disaster can sometime be avoided with planning and foresight, and this is the argument of the Spaniards who were made victims by the recently value-neutral earth. Insurance companies, ironically still comfortable with using the phrase ‘act of God’, cannot replace creation, only repair destruction, for they are not themselves Gods. Insurance can only take action, not render act. Because we are persons, our Gods personalized, our leaders elevated but not exalted, we must come to terms with both action and labor, ‘own’ our responsibilities but not author them, and leave the act to history and the work to the arts. Only a God resurrects; its representative, more akin to a mobile organ, presides over a ritual laying on of hands, acts as the vehicle for Mana, and wields it on behalf of the people at large. The sovereign sacrifices all that is merely human, and unknowingly, for from the beginning of his presence he will not be human. The Dalai Lama is perhaps the last vestige of the sovereign whom Bataille brilliantly analyses. Not a person, not quite human, he is gendered only for convenience, dressed only as a sign is dressed. His lot is no pillar of fire by night, but even so, the sovereign is expected to guide his people through his decisions. The body of the sovereign is culpable if other bodies fail; in this case, the earthly corpus lashing out, taking the people’s corpses into itself, in an excessive ritual of inhuman inhumation.

What of our own expectations? It is commonly said that we expect ‘too much’ from our politicians, and not only given the dynamics of office and how one attains it. But this hypertrophic trophy, the leader, cannot connote a victory other than one political. It is not that we expect too much of the person but rather of the position. The reality is, is that a politician is not a sovereign, a person not a God, the office of policies not a temple of wisdoms. So, when the earth reminds us of its own current status, forever now apart from the transformational cosmology of the social contract and, more recently, divorced from its ability to at least provide recurring subsistence as a ‘land’ does for its people, we shall suffer. It is part of our drive for Babel redux that compels us to lay our too-possessive hands upon the earth, but in this we mistake the relationship a God had with earth; that we imagine the earth was enthralled to the Mana of Being, rather than it itself existing as its own form of being. Just so, since we are not Gods, our beings must remain ‘in the world’ and not within the earth. For only do the dead make the earth their home.

The castigation of Castile is a case of mistaken identity. At once, the politics of identity is called into question: who leads? As well, the idea of identity politics emerges more fully: we shall seek to resurrect not ourselves – once again, only I as a God could do so – but instead our tribe; that which existed before there were either sovereigns or divinities. The question is itself recurring: can we manifest the community of the social contract on a global scale without descending into the mechanical solidarity which made society possible in the first place?

G.V. Loewen is the author of over 60 books. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

The Disarming Decoys of Elizabethanism

I was a few feet away from Elizabeth II on her royal visit to Victoria in 1984. She seemed to me a ‘decent sort’, to be English about it, but hardly otherworldly. Her consort, Philip, actually stooped to stop and chat with my young love interest. But even at eighteen, I was disdainful of the idea of the monarchy, an archaism at best, realistically, a rationalization for steep social stratification and at worst, a malingering evil that served as gaudy and expensive signage for a latter day imperialism. But as well at only eighteen, I was blissfully ignorant of the extent and scope of the oppression involved even in the twilight of the Pax Britannica. For me, Elizabeth II was a fellow philatelist and a home-front teen heroine who repaired land rovers and literally got her hands dirty doing so. But such stains as these wash off. There are other kinds of stains, as Lady Macbeth discovered, which are more challenging to cleanse.

Though it is patently correct to acknowledge that Elizabeth II had no direct political power, she did not lack influence. In a sense, her position is rather like that of the pope. No ‘divisions in the field’, as Stalin duly noted of the Vatican, but still possessed of a symbolic authority that rested upon ancient traditions. In a word, a voice, that the vast majority of us could never dream of so having. In another word, it was a voice that, from the post-colonial perspective, from the perspective of bitter and thence embittered experience, betrayed both itself and its authority through its decades of unblemished silence.

Elizabeth II was thrust into her role at a youthful age due to what the war had done to her father. It basically killed him. The feudal model is graced with a kind of superiority complex, if you will, which engenders a paternalism that for all the wrong reasons, fans of shows like ‘Downton Abbey’ seem to flock to. The same model is fraught with delusory notions of ‘divine right’ and ‘sovereignty’ that were dumped by the European Enlightenment and deeply and critically analyzed by contemporary thinkers such as Georges Bataille. That the new wealth of emerging nations is eager to reproduce such relations in a microcosm – there are now five times as many slaves in the world as there were two decades ago, though slavery was itself never a function of feudalism historically – is most disturbing. But given that feudal order, George VI was as loyal to his ‘subjects’ as they were supposed to be to him. Their suffering was his suffering, for he was, if not the ‘State itself’ – as Louis XIV decorously declared of himself and could do so prior to the Revolution – still the body politic. The wounds inflicted upon this shared symbolic corpus slowly bled George VI to death.

And so what to make of this loyalty regarding his eldest daughter? What kind of voice is the voice of a ‘modern monarch’, when the very phrase is itself an oxymoron? Is she merely a representation of the citizenry, serving them without guiding them, adding her gravitas to their collective grief, placing her ebullience in the center of their shared joy? Elizabeth II must have had many moments of doubt. One recent one that escaped the official censors which surrounded her on all sides, occurred at the climate summit in Scotland when, after listening to various politicians including Britain’s then PM, whispered to the new queen consort, ‘I find it irritating when they say and don’t do.’ Truly a ‘me too’ moment for any concerned citizen. And ‘irritating’ is a most diplomatic term to use in such a context. But just here we realize how limited Elizabeth II made her own voice. And aside from criticism, she was not at all without a piquant sense of humor, also something desperately missing in politicians. Two reported examples: outside of Windsor strolling with her single bodyguard, two American tourists asked her if she had ‘ever seen the queen?’. She replied, ‘no, but he has’, referring to her agent. And another time, she was shopping in a little village store and the young woman clerk said to her, ‘you know, you look just like the queen!’. Her dry reply: ‘how reassuring.’

It is precisely these kinds of moments that give me the sense that Elizabeth II was not devoid of the ability to speak, she simply felt that she could not do so. It is our loss, surely, because in voicing the critique which I believe to have been fully present in her consciousness, she would have been authentically following in the footsteps of her predecessor and namesake, a woman it is well known that Elizabeth II admired and studied. Elizabeth I inherited a disastrous political mess from her father, who had declared the Church of England and risked a devastating war of religion across the realm. So she quite literally supplanted the Catholic heroine by reframing herself as the ‘Virgin Queen’. She gave worshippers the very symbolism they desired from any church and thereby avoided further chaos. Whatever may have been her personal sacrifice – presumably even queens have ‘needs’, so it is highly unlikely that Elizabeth I practiced a lifetime of abstinence – she saw it as her duty to save a nation just emerging from the feudal order into the then unknown future politics of parliament and people.

In another word, Elizabeth I was a decoy figure, meant to disarm mass desire and turn it into collective adoration. I think Elizabeth II saw herself in that same light, and this is why she made the personal sacrifice of silence on all things that truly mattered over a period of seven tumultuous and hitherto unforeseen decades. The modern version of the Virgin, in both politics and religion alike, is the woman who does not speak and only appears. She does not visit but performs visitations. She does not meddle but only presents herself at the most apt moment, akin to the 1950s housewife and the indentured servant of today. To say that she was a prisoner is to only name the effect. Like her namesake, she imprisoned herself, and while we are astonished and perhaps a little dismissive of Elizabeth I’s idea of a revolutionary figurehead, we are also mournful that her distant successor was not yet more revolutionary, did not make her own revolution in what a monarch could have been. Instead, we had a duplicate of the first Elizabeth and in our modernity, it simply didn’t work. When I grieve for her passing, it will be this that I will be thinking of, and nothing else besides.

G.V. Loewen is the author of over fifty books in ethics, education, social theory, health and aesthetics, and more recently, fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.