MAYBE THERE'S HOPE FOR BRITAIN YET:

Prince Charles: Could the anti-Enlightenment views of King Charles III destroy the "welfare monarchy"? (Tristram Hunt, June 2004, Prospect uk)

According to the theologian Ian Bradley, the monarchy - as a result of Charles's efforts - is adopting a new rhetoric of "healing, wholeness, openness, tolerance and vulnerability" to sit alongside if not replace the old ideas of sacrifice and loyalty. Armed with these more contemporary values, Prince Charles, according to Bradley, is leading the "resacralisation of our secularised society." The prince's thinking is probably best understood as an amalgam of the "small is beautiful" eco-philosophy of Fritz Schumacher, the "Gaia" teachings of James Lovelock (which posited the animate and inanimate Earth as one connected, living organism), as well as the dangerously seductive conservatism of his late mentor, the ethnographer and "storyteller," Laurens van der Post. His more philosophically ambitious advisers like to suggest that the prince is involved in reviving classical Platonism. But at its core, Prince Charles's credo entails a vigorous, reactionary anti-Enlightenment sensibility. What he is drawn to are the metaphors of the great chain of being, the language of order, harmony, and balance which governed the pre-modern world. He admires natural rhythms, intuition, and the ancestral wisdom of tribal societies such as the Dalai Lama's Tibet. What he abhors is the arrogance of reason, the rationality of science and with it a mechanised, material world of secular, autonomous individuals. As Van der Post put it, "We suffer from a hubris of the mind... We have abolished superstition of the heart only to install a superstition of the intellect in its place."

Much of this assault on contemporary rationalism flows from the prince's rather eclectic spiritualism. Despite being a regular Anglican communicant and prospective supreme governor of the Church of England, there is little in Prince Charles's public pronouncements which points to a strong commitment to Pauline Christianity. Instead, he has retreated into what is grandly termed "perennial philosophy" - a curious medley of Buddhism, mysticism and inner soul-searching which seems little different from some of the theosophical teachings of the 1890s. It is this broader, incarnational notion of spiritualism which led Prince Charles to speak of his ambitions to be a "defender of faith" rather than the traditional title of "defender of the faith."

In many of Charles's musings, one can recognise that concern of early Victorians about the effects of the mechanised, atomistic society unleashed by the industrial revolution. They too worried about the cost of progress and its effects on the traditional ties underpinning the social fabric. Thomas Carlyle saw industrialising England entering a "mechanical age" where it was "no longer the moral, religious, spiritual condition of the people that is our concern, but their physical, practical, economical condition."

Carlyle's solution to a disintegrating, secularising society was a revived feudalism. Although some of the pre-industrial imagery which envelops Highgrove might hint at similar ambitions, Prince Charles has yet to advocate this remedy publicly. But there is a suspicion that his admiration for harmony and hierarchy slips seamlessly from the natural to the social order. And at the apex of the traditional societies which both he and Van der Post so admire stands the monarchy. As JDF Jones's superb biography revealed, Van der Post argued in many letters to the prince that a renewed respect for the natural world and its peoples demanded leadership from traditional rulers. "The battle for our renewal can be most naturally led by what is still one of the few great living symbols accessible to us - the symbol of the crown."

When defending his right to speak out, Prince Charles frequently resorts to this idea of the prince as holder of ancient wisdom and natural vessel of his people's unspoken concerns. Again, this is a return to a pre-modern idea of monarchy and while Charles has been at the forefront of updating aspects of the royal family, he believes strongly (with the late Queen Mother) in regal splendour and is often a stickler for traditional protocol. According to Michael Mann, former Windsor chaplain, "He shares his grandmother's belief that we in Britain must have no banana court, and that there must be no lowering of the standards in which majesty is displayed."

Accompanying this faith in princely power has been an animus against professional bodies and organised knowledge. Van der Post once warned that his great crusade, "this journey of individuation and rediscovery of the self," necessitated the defeat of "those great priesthoods of science, particularly applied science, technology and economic realism." The prince has never been slow to act on this advice, with architects, doctors, urban planners, politicians, teachers, civil servants and scientists all experiencing his royal wrath. At times it almost seems as if the Prince of Wales has a chip on his royal shoulder. There is an almost Pooterish distaste towards their professional superiority and overweening reason - as opposed, one imagines, to the intuitive wisdom of the bushmen of the Kalahari. Painfully, in his 1989 book A Vision of Britain, he even quoted GK Chesterton - "We are the people of England, that never have spoken yet" - to ally himself boorishly with his people against the arrogant architectural elite.

But there seems little appreciation by Prince Charles of the conservatism which underpins his faith in the sanctity of tradition. Repeatedly in his speeches there appears the supplication not to "venture into realms that belong to God and God alone" - the age old battlecry of those defending the indefensible, from creationism to slavery. Complementing it is a hostility to intellectual ambition, to the Enlightenment call of broadening man's knowledge and the power of reasoning. He shows no sense of how tradition can also function as one of the great veils of injustice. Social mobility and bettering one's family has no big place in the prince's schema.

These intuitive principles and personal antagonisms came together in his criticisms of modern architecture. Here stood the enemy at its most unapologetic: modernism, professional arrogance, and the hubris of reason. "A large number of us have developed a feeling that architects tend to design buildings for the approval of fellow architects and critics, not for the tenants," he famously told a dinner to mark the 150th anniversary of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1984. Instead of the vanity of modernity, the prince yearned for the pre-industrial skyline of Canaletto or Christopher Wren, where "the affinity between buildings and the earth, in spite of the city's immense size, was so close and organic that the houses looked almost as though they had grown out of the earth and had not been imposed upon it..." Famously, he went on to call Peter Ahrends's design for the National Gallery extension, "a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much loved and elegant friend." And in the process, he turned himself into an extra, princely tier of the democratic planning process for nationally significant buildings.

He needs to ditch the New Age hooha and get back to the Church, but he's on the right track at least.

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 14, 2004 8:21 AM