Death of a Queen

When Queen Elizabeth died on the evening of September 8, there was a cricket match underway between England and South Africa. For those (unfortunate) folks unfamiliar with cricket, this was a test match, which can last up to five days. Prior to resumption on the morning of the 10th, there was a moment of silence, followed by the singing of the national anthem.

It was first time God Save the King was sung at a major sporting event since the death of George VI in 1952:

Watching this ceremony brought a number of thoughts to mind.

First, the lyrics are anachronistic in the extreme. The words were written when the monarchy wielded considerable political power and the king was expected to lead troops into battle. In fact, the original opening line was “God save great George our King” in response to the defeat of George II by a Jacobite army led by Charles Edward Stuart, who was trying to seize back the throne for his father. Hence:

Send him victorious,
Happy and glorious,
Long to reign over us,
God save the king!

Despite the peculiar and dated lyrics, however, the anthem seems to fill a very deep human need among large segments of the population. The joining of voices in song, the applause at the end, and the wiping away of tears all seemed entirely sincere. The scale and depth of mourning in the country is staggering.

Societies are more than the sum of their parts, and cannot thrive (or even long survive) unless something binds people together. It is not enough, I think, for people to find community in their houses of worship, or political groupings, or sports stadiums. There have to be some bridges across the chasms if the whole is not to disintegrate into warring parts.

But what binds people together cannot simply be a parochial patriotism and an appeal to tradition. In the UK, unifying symbols must speak meaningfully to the anti-monarchists who constitute about a third of the population, and who are currently facing arrest for silently holding up pieces of paper. It must appeal to the descendants of migrants from former colonies in Africa, South Asia, and the Caribbean. And it must even bring on board the irreverent folks who took the once-banned song God Save the Queen to the top of the charts, and made the title track on The Queen Is Dead a cult classic. These anti-establishment compositions are also quintessentially British.

The current national anthem cannot possibly bind all of these communities together. Something more inclusive is needed.

Patriotism is necessarily tied to stability and tradition, but as norms evolve and societies are transformed through demographic and cultural change, older rituals can start to appear stale and oppressive. We are faced, then, with a choice between attachment to archaic symbols by an ever-shrinking subset of the population, or a change in the meaning of patriotism itself.

I’ve been thinking about these issues for a while now, in the context of the United States. There is no monarchy here, of course, but patriotism is often laced with hagiographic profiles of the founding fathers. To fault them for being morally compromised (by the standards of our age) is viewed as unpatriotic. And on the other side of this divide, patriotism itself is seen as suspect, a cousin of other unappealing isms—nationalism, authoritarianism, imperialism, and colonialism.

An alternative path for us to take would be to build an inclusive patriotism, by continuing to cherish the egalitarian impulses in our founding documents, while also recognizing that American society existed and was shaped by all manner of forces long before these documents came into being.

A brilliant essay by Ralph Ellison, published by Time Magazine in 1970, suggests a possible path forward along these lines. The essay is an examination of “what the nation would have become had Africans not been brought to the New World, and had their descendants not played such a complex and confounding role in the creation of American history and culture.”

Ellison writes:

If we can cease approaching American social reality in terms of such false concepts as white and nonwhite, black culture and white culture, and think of these apparently unthinkable matters in the realistic manner of Western pioneers confronting the unknown prairie, perhaps we can begin to imagine what the U.S. would have been, or not been, had there been no blacks to give it—if I may be so bold as to say—color.

For one thing, the American nation is in a sense the product of the American language, a colloquial speech that began emerging long before the British colonials and Africans were transformed into Americans. It is a language that evolved from the king's English but, basing itself upon the realities of the American land and colonial institutions—or lack of institutions, began quite early as a vernacular revolt against the signs, symbols, manners and authority of the mother country. It is a language that began by merging the sounds of many tongues, brought together in the struggle of diverse regions. And whether it is admitted or not, much of the sound of that language is derived from the timbre of the African voice and the listening habits of the African ear… Its flexibility, its musicality, its rhythms, freewheeling diction and metaphors… were absorbed by the creators of our great 19th century literature even when the majority of blacks were still enslaved. Mark Twain celebrated it in the prose of Huckleberry Finn; without the presence of blacks, the book could not have been written. No Huck and Jim, no American novel as we know it. For not only is the black man a co-creator of the language that Mark Twain raised to the level of literary eloquence, but Jim's condition as American and Huck's commitment to freedom are at the moral center of the novel.

In other words, had there been no blacks, certain creative tensions arising from the cross-purposes of whites and blacks would also not have existed. Not only would there have been no Faulkner; there would have been no Stephen Crane, who found certain basic themes of his writing in the Civil War. Thus, also, there would have been no Hemingway, who took Crane as a source and guide… Without the presence of blacks, our political history would have been otherwise. No slave economy, no Civil War; no violent destruction of the Reconstruction; no K.K.K. and no Jim Crow system. And without the disenfranchisement of black Americans and the manipulation of racial fears and prejudices, the disproportionate impact of white Southern politicians upon our domestic and foreign policies would have been impossible. Indeed, it is almost impossible to conceive of what our political system would have become without the snarl of forces—cultural, racial, religious—that makes our nation what it is today.

Absent, too, would be the need for that tragic knowledge which we try ceaselessly to evade: that the true subject of democracy is not simply material well-being but the extension of the democratic process in the direction of perfecting itself.

This last thought—that democracy is not a condition but rather a process of self-perfection—is encapsulated in a lovely verse in America the Beautiful:

America! America!
God mend thine ev’ry flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law.

I have previously written about this verse, and about Ellison’s essay, and brought up the latter in a recent conversation with Glenn Loury. But the audience for such dialogues is now so deeply polarized, and my powers of expression on the fly so limited, that I failed to do the subject justice.

The point is simply this—a static and sanitized patriotism will be parochial in nature and alienate large segments of the population, while a rejection of patriotism itself will end in social disintegration. It is essential, therefore, to try and craft a dynamic and inclusive patriotism. And the seeds of this may be found in Ellison’s essay, and in a rarely-sung verse of a very familiar song.