The Queen: a ritual sharing-of-thoughts on her death

 

As the nation is subjected to enforced mourning, I want to discuss what the queen means to me [spoiler alert: not very much, but she is a useful angle to touch on important subjects].

Personal sorrow

              Her public façade was carefully maintained so that she appeared to be a constant, apolitical figure. This ensured that I have no insight into her true character: I feel no personal connection, even in the not-actually-real way that people do with celebrities who do not know them in return. She made sure that she was simply a formal, characterless institution.

Death is tragic

              Any mourning cannot be because of the loss of a personal connection. All death is tragic, so celebrating her death would also be wrong. But 550,000 people die every year in the country, almost all of them younger than the queen was. Maybe 1% of people are decent, wonderful people who deserve to be celebrated, so even if we assume that the queen’s life of service and wealth qualify her as such a person, a few other amazing people probably died on the exact same day in the UK. Of course, many people quite reasonably believe that all death is tragic even if a person wasn’t virtuous and deserving, but I think that’s a better criterion than whether the person was a child or popular (‘well-liked’), which are common labels attached to other news reports about deaths. If we mourn her death because deaths are bad, we must mourn every day for the tragedies unfolding all around us.           

              I can’t mourn her death either through personal attachment or out of respect for death in general. It doesn’t make sense.

Monarchs are special

              I never enjoyed the idea of being reigned over. I cannot grieve the loss of a monarch because she was my queen. I perceive myself as living in one of the freer countries in the world, and that freedom is a good thing. I feel no attachment or dedication to those in exalted positions in life. I know that they deserve no such position above me; that the existence of such positions is an affront to all that is good and decent. No man is my master, nor even any god. I regard the monarchy as a ceremonial institution; a relic of history.

              I can’t mourn the queen’s death because of some sort of worship of superior beings. I have equal moral worth, and so do all the other dying people. The monarchy as a religion is nonsensical.

 An institution gone

              She was, however, an institution in another sense. People feel a sense of constancy from seeing the same figures in public life, and the number of figures providing this constancy have shrunk during the information age, with people viewing and participating in all sorts of different media, churning through different sections of the great bubbling pot of celebrity.

              My impression is that the queen, like a secular religion, provided people with a durable figure that reassured them of stability in a changing world: that the turbulent future need not be feared, because some things stay constant; the era has not really shifted to something entirely new and unintelligible; that it is possible to endure.

              This stability gives people a connection to the past and a sense of identity and safety. All entirely false.

               

              Some people, who crave stability, and who fear the unknown; who struggle to understand everything in the world, which makes it all the more worrying, might legitimately feel a new emotion as the queen dies. It is the emotion they should have been feeling all along. The queen did not actually protect them from Tzar Putin, from SARS-CoV-2, from Emperor Xi, from polio, poverty, petrol prices, cancer, new ideas or changing culture. The reassurance that everything was alright was false: they should have been as lost as they now feel, and they should have been voting and acting to address these fears.

              The world does change. Culture moves on, and you’re still a bigot even if the imagery around you is still similar to the imagery from when bigotry was normal. Culture moves on, and you still come across as weird even if people did meet at a pub in front of the same imagery that is now the background to lives lived by text message and short videos.

              Diseases rise, booms and busts happen, and they need to be faced. A feeling of safety that comes from anything other than good governance, good research and good friends simply is a vice: an opiate of the masses that kills the pain without addressing the cause.

              So although I think that this is the truth behind what genuine sorrow there is in the population, I still can’t mourn the queen’s death because of the loss of stability.

A remarkable life

              The queen’s life spanned a period of enormous change, and the contrasts between the world when she was crowned and the world when she died are remarkable. That’s what people seem to mean when assessing her ‘remarkable life’: a look back over her life is a chance to look at recent history and see how much has happened.

              This wonder at change in the world is legitimate, and there will always be a certain wistfulness about all the people she met who have also faded into history and all the fun or exciting events that we forgot until now. That’s the nature of time and our limited lifespans and attention spans. It is a source of sorrow that we can’t remember every great thing in our lives all the time, and that some things fade, and great achievements come to be regarded as mere bricks in the great edifice of history.

              These are all good reasons to feel a sort of sorrow, but her death is a mere reminder of the state of things. We can feel sad about this, but mourning her specifically for these reasons is wildly inappropriate. Many lives spanned these decades, all experiencing the changing world.

 

Ritual bonding

              For many people, ceremonies are a source of connection. Shared experience is the basis of this, although of course people experience the same event very differently. People crave ritual not just for the false feelings of comfort and safety it provides but also because joint activities bond people together. Some people, at least. I never went to a club and found the dancing bonded me to anything except the sticky floor. It was the chatting over drinks that made nights out for me.

              I did attend church in the past (with my mother), and despite sitting behind the same couple every fortnight for years I never felt bonded to them because of shared ritual.

              I feel no joy from joining in with activities I didn’t want to do in the first place: ‘joining in’ is not, in itself, a joyful thing. Losing my individuality is, in fact, unpleasant, and losing my independence unthinkable. I do not like conformity and I never feel part of a crowd except in the purely physical sense. I will go so far as to assert that the almost religious fervour some people feel about ‘atmosphere’ at events is as objectively true as religions: i.e. not at all. It is a false belief about connection with everyone else, just like taking ecstasy.

              But to people who have this attitude towards ritual and conformity, those of us who are more sane seem wayward. It looks to them like we are rejecting them: there is an opportunity to bond joyfully in glorious total conformity and we are pulling the rug out from under it, undermining that sense of shared experience that is vital for their good feelings.

              I think I understand (vaguely) their irrationality, but the fact that their pleasure depends on my behaviour does not mean that I must make them happy, even at the expense of my own happiness. I am an independent being, not part of their collective. In so far as we are a collective by virtue of being part of the same society, I get as much right to define its nature as they do.
              Talk of uniting as a country is as self-serving as it was when it was about uniting behind Brexit. It means ‘forget what you want and do what I want, and don’t make me feel bad about forcing it on you by daring to act as if you didn’t want it’. Any feeling of unity that arises from that is false and comes at the expense of a great mass of hidden unhappiness.

              So I can’t mourn the queen for the sake of ritual. Although not all rituals will feel like an imposition on me, so I might participate in some of them, such as a bank holiday, or writing up one’s own personal feelings about her death.

 

              Beyond that, I simply can’t find any reason to mourn her death, beyond it being one of another few thousand deaths every day that are all sad.