The English upper class have failed us. By Mary Harrington in UnHerd.
Charles’s and Diana’s institution-building and moral-reform instincts went in search of a canvas at sufficient scale. Alas: they found themselves reborn as warring emotional camps, in an America-led, globalised 24-hour TV entertainment cycle. In this frenzied setting, a sensibility that once ruled the world degraded into an ugly divorce battle, between “duty” in Charles’s sense of subsuming your feelings for the greater good, and Diana’s of pursuing personal truth, no matter what the cost.
Diana’s personal truths:
This resonated more widely than just the Windsors, because the battle was also raging throughout our erstwhile imperial class. Long before Diana died, her combination of idealism and selfishness was a sufficiently common cultural hangover of the Sixties to have been vividly satirised in the Nineties sitcom Absolutely Fabulous.
The show’s two central characters, Patsy and Eddie, capture the hedonism and sentimental, self-righteous attitude this produced — while casting a sharp eye at Britain’s fraying upper class. Only Patsy is genuinely “posh”, but she also has no money: she lives a parasitic life in nouveau riche Eddie’s house, where she guzzles Eddie’s champagne, makes use of her chauffeur, and bullies her staid daughter, while weeping crocodile tears whenever challenged.
The year after Ab Fab stopped broadcasting, Diana’s sudden death declared her self-involved version of “duty” the winner in the media battle, as it were by martyrdom and canonisation. As Tony Blair solemnly declared at the time, she was the “People’s Princess”. From there on in, the Patsy and Eddie version of “authenticity” was to be the new normal for Modern Britain. …
Watching Earl Spencer justify his latest salvos against King Charles to Laura Kuenssberg, I don’t doubt his assertion that if he really wanted to spill the tea, there are spicier truth-bombs he could drop. But clearly he doesn’t just want to screw King Charles. … Like Patsy and Eddie, he wants to destroy his enemies and not be made to feel guilty and still have everyone agree that he’s a really nice person.
Charles put the greater good before his feelings:
What of the other side, meanwhile? If Britain’s posho moral-reform instincts have long since resiled into wokeness, philandering, and crybully emotional terrorism, the proponents of emotionally detached team spirit are just as gravely adrift. …
Here, for example, we find hereditary products of Britain’s erstwhile imperial class such as Boris Johnson, opening Britain’s borders to the “Boriswave”. We find Jacob Rees-Mogg enjoining British plebs (presumably excluding himself) to “do their duty” and enlist to defend their nation, even as those plebs witness government after government refusing to defend Britain’s own coastline because of “international law”. And, indeed, we find the recent, cold-blooded assertion by Rory Stewart that the mass rape of British girls by Pakistani-heritage clan mafia networks is a trivial issue compared to real problems, such as the future of AI governance….
“It’s not our fault”:
These two poles represent, between them, the spread of ways a decadent upper class can absolve itself of responsibility.
On the one side, by resiling into Patsy and Eddie emotivism, and saying, of anything inconvenient or guilt-inducing: “It wasn’t my fault because I’m nice and a victim.”
On the other, by fixating on “the future of mankind” rather than of a particular people, and offloading responsibility to assorted forms of technocracy, from institutions, to international laws …
The failure of the English ruling class:
A fish rots from the head down. Ordinary Brits are still demonstrably capable of self-organising in a crisis, for the common good, at a pragmatic scale. If our country is in a bad way, ultimate responsibility lies with our leadership class, which long since committed itself to a general stance of “it’s not my fault”, or “we need to make things even more neutral”.
Whether the supposed culprit is personal trauma, institutional racism, Donald Trump, International Law, or AI Swarm Gods, we’re stuck with this ghastly tranche of wet-eyed cry-bullies and cold-blooded universalists, none of whom shows the slightest interest in the one thing they’re supposed to do: lead and serve, in the interests of their own nation. …
It’s not really possible to do without an elite. But we really could do without one whose sole unifying refrain is “It’s not my fault”.
hat-tip Stephen Neil