Hollow Crowns

Pay attention to any of our contemporary political commentators for long enough and they will eventually start ruing the divided state of the nation before expressing a desire for some sort of curative coming together, which they will probably add, is the more natural state of affairs. (Even some of the Tory leadership candidates are not entirely averse to this.) And it is, to a large extent, nonsense. Any serious look at our history reveals that division is the more natural and probably more productive state. There are nearly always at least two available camps to sit in. In the fifteenth century for example, the English were split along dynastic lines, York and Lancaster. The following century saw this conflict morph rather suddenly into an argument over faith, which in turn, one hundred years later, segued into a dispute between King and Parliament. Thesis, antithesis, Synthesis. Hegel called this dialectic. Yet what we see is that the terms shift, so that synthesis remains perpetually elusive - an interminable teleology in which those who speak of achieving a final end to the prevailing controversy and its unpleasant consequences should of necessity be treated with scorn. (The young Henry VIII rather amusingly imagined that his accession marked a sort of ‘end of history’ moment.) So, Brexit appears to be firmly in this tradition, and yet it reveals an interesting truth about the pattern. Not all theses and antitheses are of equal weight. It’s not hard to see for example that from an intellectual perspective the argument between Monarch and Parliament was more meaningful than the fracas between the red and white roses. And so now, we can examine the current reconfiguration of our political animus and conclude that the great confrontation of the last century, between Left and Right, between liberal and totalitarian systems, which some imagined would resolve rather conveniently into a worldwide Scandinavian-style social democratic group hug, has instead kicked off anew into a national schism over the EU. And it is SO empty. One only has to listen for the briefest of moments to the extreme ideologues of Leave or Remain to comprehend the void at the heart of this altercation, how lacking in genuine intellectual content it therefore tends to be. Most of them end up trying to spice things up by shamelessly borrowing the terminology from last century’s polarities:‘Nazi!’ In the first part of the twentieth century I do believe it really mattered to which side one was adopted. In the Spanish Civil War for example, we didn’t see an absolute confrontation between right and wrong, but the choices made were meaningful and had real ethical underpinnings. So it was in the Reformation and then in the English Revolution. Brexit, in comparison, invites its protagonists to adopt positions that are obviously hollow from the outset and from almost any perspective.