The True Winner of the X-Factor
Civitas, 15 December 2009
Irrespective of whether it is utter bilge or compulsive viewing, the massive popularity of ‘the X Factor’ reveals in the country a deep need for which the just concluded weekly TV singing talent contest apparently is able to cater admirably.
According to the head of the media and communications department of Leicester University, that need is for some common shared experience that can act as a binding force through providing something about which even perfect strangers can converse.
Of such a ‘big communal Saturday-night experience’ as it, he observed:
‘People really value it these days. In fact, the more we fragment, the more we need it.’
One might have wished that what provided such a common talking-point could have been somewhat more elevated. But, in this day and age, I think that we must be grateful for small mercies. That something is still able to serve such a unifying function should not be lightly dismissed simply because it is so relatively mindless.
Amongst truly binding national institutions, nothing comes close to the Royal Family. However much the intelligentsia might decry the institution as outmoded and undemocratic, it still continues to exert a hugely beneficial civic function as a unifying force, as well as thankfully to continue to enjoy massive popularity.
Moreover, in the person of the present Queen, the country has been blessed to have had an exemplary monarch. As Matthew Parris correctly noted of her in this week’s Times magazine:
‘… in an age when everyone is supposed to emote, preferably in public, the Queen has shown the most unfashionable of qualities: reserve… To combine such a sense of privacy with so terrifyingly public a role shows some kind of genius of self-possession…
‘We do not know, and never will, whether the Queen actually enjoys being a monarch. She betrays no sense that she gets any kind of a kick out of her status… The Queen rules because she must: it is her duty, and sometimes a painful one. I admire this more than I can say.’
Well said!
Indeed, the Queen will be a very hard act to follow. So long has she been on the throne, it is very difficult to imagine anyone else occupying the office. Sadly, however, intimations of the mortality of the present incumbent were provided at the week-end by press reports, quickly denied by Buckingham Palace, that the 83 year-old monarch is making over more and more of her engagements to her grand-son William.
You couldn’t blame her, if after over half a century, the Queen wasn’t now keen to lighten her load somewhat.
It will certainly be interesting to see whether the office can survive its present incumbent, given her popularity, the relative unpopularity of the next-in-line, and how iconoclastic of late those wielding political power would appear to have become.
I for one hope that the monarchy endures if for no other reason than the one provided by the sociologists Edward Shils and Michael Young in an article entitled ‘The Meaning of the Coronation’ published over half a century ago in 1956. They noted:
‘Over the past century, British society, despite distinctions of nationality and social status, has achieved a degree of moral unity equalled by no other large national state… constitutional monarchy and political democracy has [sic] played a part in the creation and maintenance of this moral consensus.’
Somewhat later, in his intellectual autobiography, Shils elaborated on what he had meant by that claim. He wrote as follows:
‘I saw the coronation and the popular participation in it as a national communion around the sacrality of the kingship… The coronation ceremonial brought British society into contact with the sacred through bringing the queen, as the hereditary representative of the British national society, into contact with sacrality. The British people, by virtue of their nativity, their descent and long residence on British territory, were reinforced in their solidarity or their attachment to British society.’
To forgo the binding force created by the institution of the monarchy and the coronation ceremony would be a tragic loss for which no number of rounds of the X Factor could ever make up, however popular.
As one by one all the great institutions of this once proud, great nation have been systematically humiliated and de-legitimated, from the Westminster Parliament to the Church of England, it seems on some days that the monarchy is all that the country has left to keep alive its sense of moral and social unity. On such days, one is reminded of D.H.Lawrence’s prescient and elegiac observation about England made in 1915. He wrote:
‘When I drive across this country, with autumn falling and rustling to pieces, I am so sad, for my country, for this great wave of civilisation, which is now collapsing, that it is hard to live. So much beauty and pathos of old things passing away and no new things coming: this house – it is England – my God, it breaks my soul! … their England, these shafted windows, the elm trees, the blue distance –the past, the great past, crumbling down, breaking down… for the winter stretches ahead, where all vision is lost, and memory dies out!’
Let us hope that the monarchy long continues to endure, as does its present incumbent.