Not since the national spasm when Princess Diana died, have we gone through such a roller-coaster of projected religiosity, histrionic deference, and performative emoting. Mass sentiment to the point of self-hypnosis seems, with the recent Queen-athon, to have driven us into the arms of sentimentality and religiosity as never before.
Simply getting on with the job and the normal business of practical life has been held in suspension. At such times, in the spirit of an unexpected realism about humbug, we succeeded in brainwashing ourselves into a state of sentimental torpor. The lugubrious and plangent dumb show of ritual has engulfed us all with a parade of decorated puppets in their gilded uniforms or sombre suiting, taking part in peculiar pageantry explained implausibly by their historicity and more than a little lurking self-satisfied jingoism.
For anyone with an ounce of objectivity, the experience of recent days must surely have evoked (and I hope provoked) serious questions about monarchy and privilege, and the best and only model for a modern Britain – perhaps an alternative model of a less united kingdom.
And, enmeshed with that, further questions about religiosity in modern Britain – religion morphed into religiosity, crafted by an arcane lore barely shared by most people in Britain today – that of ecclesiological elitism and intellectual muddle-headedness.
These queries add up to critique which, to espouse, can seem atheistical and churlish at best, and destructively anti-social at worst. Yet, if we give the matter a moment's thought, and allow rational analysis into the euphoric world of emotionalism, they are queries worth asking.
First monarchy and privilege: not just what they are but what they are seen to be at times of national crisis and sentiment. It's a popular personal and group-think narrative to tell ourselves that, while the Queen was a good sort, and so is the King, and so are the Great and the Good in general, what they represent in constitutional and cultural terms presents more than a small dilemma.
Historically, the apex of a pyramid of privilege going back centuries, one which a selective interpretation of history excuses the inequalities and racisms of the past, this view of ourselves as a form of hierarchy of white-faced goodness extending up to a Christian God is merely a lazily partisan way for monarchical obsessives and religious sectarians to reconcile their paradoxical attitudes to the facts and utilise it as a platform for preachy self-assertion.
The amalgam of religiosity and nationalism, so easily brought out by ceremonial and so lovingly nourished by the media, enables us (if we let it) to recapture the war-time spirit that still treasures the memory of how we beat the Nazis and, in more recent times, cuddle the mythography of a global Britain keen to unshackle itself from dullards in Europe. The tension is between living in the real world today and the warm-bath world of a post-Ealing comedy world full of
Carry On or PG Wodehouse characters strutting their complacent sense of self-righteousness.
Religion, above all in the form into which it has morphed, religiosity, is presented as the natural cultural default position of the reasonable citizen, something that lies at the heart of each of us as if it's a caption in a stick of rock.
Hardcore religious belief is a minority sport in secular Britain. Its urge to present itself as mainly Christian (as in 'we are a Christian country') misrepresents the existence of many faiths and beliefs, and ignores widespread indifference to and ignorance of any theological ideas. Saying sorry masquerades as repentance, sacrifice occurs when we momentarily doubt consumerism, and pilgrimages are things television personalities go on when they present travel programmes.
Moments – or indeed artificially prolonged hours – of national grief challenge us to check out just how hierarchical and faith-centric we really are. We're only human and so understandably turn to each other at such times, powerfully aware of our shared frailty and humanity. We don't want it thought that we are somehow less human than everybody else.
So, however cogent it seems to us for us to go against the common grain, however intellectually honest we hope to be about what we believe, and however much we can explain our prejudices and assumptions as formed by nature or nurture, mass ceremonial lures us into a world where sentimentality replaces sentiment, religiosity supplants religion, where being part of something larger is really an uncontrolled form of compromise to the point of self-denial.
If all this stuff of ritual and faith is indeed so potent, then how is it that, at other times and in ordinary life, we subscribe to the general secular narrative that we are all adult now, not in need of a God or indeed a god of any stripe.
We succumb to sentimentalities because we want to be seen as sensitive enough to have sentiments. One shades subtly into the other, just as religion shades into religiosity, and differences are both subjective and contentious.
Concepts like compassion and altruism remain draped by the colonising effect of religion which, coming out of its hobbit-hole at times of national ceremonial, asserts as its own territory and blandly and insidiously presumes that everyone shares its assumptions. We are all royal and pious at such times – otherwise why would we watch, why would we weep and spread flowers, why might we hanker after being a nation again?
It is as if we welcome the emotional exhaustion of prolonged national ritual in order to feel more fully human again – something which the boredom and atomisation of modern life denies us. With a little skill, and some self-deception, we can ensure that no-one realises we are faking it. It is a time of illusions, where 'being there' and 'being seen to have been there' really matters, when the spectacle (as postmodernists like Debord and Baudillard told us) matters more than reality itself.
With mobile phone camera on a stick, we provide digital proof of physical and emotional engagement. Our participation in national events is performative. We slip easily into role – that of the concerned citizen – keen not be a tall tulip, rock the boat, say the unsayable, feel things anti-social.
Outward show for anyone authentically engaged with serious questions about monarchy and privilege, and with the ways in which religiosity and nationalism exploit our feelings and make us keen to feel the righteous catharsis that other normal people feel. A mixture of emotional masturbation and cultural musturbation (that sense of having to conform). Only cads refuse to conform, to 'be there' as bit players in the national story.
We infantilise ourselves, like children in Sunday School, if we ignore the necessary cultural tension between blind acceptance and adult critique. Probably the real questions come later: a credible head of state in a devolved and dis-united kingdom, the contradictions of a political levelling-up agenda, the cost of policing public events and opportunity costs where money can be spent in other ways, the wilful blindness to Ireland and the legitimacy of an English Prince of Wales, and for all its sentimental resonance in Balmoral, the future of the monarchy in Scotland.
If you were able to ponder such questions while at the same time standing in the famous queue, ogling Harry and Meghan, hearing Liz Truss and her encounter with the King James version of the Bible, you can convincingly say that you were both 'there' and 'not there'. It's good to step back from time to time, even though it's not always easy.
Dr Stuart Hannabuss is a writer and reviewer based in Scotland
