March 13, 2021

The Queen's Ambit, Paul Dirac, and the Trek

This week last year, the world changed.

This week this year, the world may have changed for the English monarchy.

Walter Bagehot, the Victorian era journalist, divided the English constitution into two parts, the dignified and the efficient. The House of Lords and the monarchy were the dignified parts, designed to serve as reminders of a once glorious past and to impress upon the unsophisticated populace with the authority and the importance of the state. The cabinet and the House of Commons were the efficient parts, where the affairs of the state were transacted by ordinary businessmen using the authority granted to them by the dignified parts. The ceremonial and the political parts of the English government are antitheses of each other and exist in a strange equilibrium. The one is opposed to the other as pleasure is to business, as emptiness is to substance, as illusion to reality, and as diplomacy to plain speaking. Royal ceremonies - coronations, jubilees, weddings - are pleasant and extravagant but essentially ephemeral, devoid of anything meaningful other than that which is sentimental, colorful and evocative. They are so far away from the world of politics and governance and other serious business that they have never been subject to much scrutiny. All that might have changed last week with Harry and Meghan, aka the Sussexes, sitting down with Oprah Winfrey to spill some tea on the inner workings of the English royalty.

As it turns out (and not all that surprisingly), the English royalty and their staff comprise deeply flawed people with rigid and regressive attitudes. If Harry and Meghan are to be believed (which I do), racism is well and alive inside the halls of the Buckingham Palace. In the interview, Harry mentioned that there was even concern expressed at one point about what had to be done if the couple’s baby was born with “a darker skin.” His wife, Meghan Markle, is an American of mixed ancestry. The young couple’s outpouring to Oprah was extraordinary and breathtaking in that it seems that none of us (not even a prince born in a royal family) is immune from being subjected to bigotry and malice.

Later in the week, Buckingham Palace responded to the allegations tersely, saying that they will be “addressed by the family privately.” Bagehot said of the monarchy, “Its mystery is its life. We must not let in daylight upon magic.” Well, the daylight is in. The issues could not have been raised in a more public manner than in an interview with one of America’s biggest stars, Oprah Winfrey. I don’t know who needs to hear this but there are queens and there is the one and the only real Queen on this planet. Her name is Oprah.

All this daylight has illuminated a monarchy that is finding the modern world to be a difficult place and a Britain struggling to find its way between right and wrong. I am sure that it must have been hard for Harry and Meghan to avoid getting into this situation in the first place. No one likes to snitch on their families. It is one of those things we learn when we are young. Also, we must remember that we have heard only one side of the story. But, the palace’s insistence on handling this explosive matter “privately” suggests a lack of awareness that times have changed. When Princess Diana, Harry’s mother, died in 1997, the royal response was seen as muted, insensitive and uncaring. Although this is quite a different situation, the lessons learned from the challenges of an independent minded young woman like Diana joining a family (a royal one, nonetheless), should have been applied. Indeed, that vexing blindness of “the Firm,” as the monarchy is called, forms the crux of Harry’s grievances.

The latest polls show that the interview has had little impact on public opinion. This means that we’re not likely to hear calls for the end of the monarchy anytime soon. Republicanism never really took roots in the UK and has always been a bridge too far for the Brits. On the other hand, more than half of those aged between 18 and 24 feel sympathy for H & M. That is telling and doesn’t bode well for the longer term future of the monarchy. I wonder how the colored peoples of the Commonwealth countries, which provide some sustenance and much prestige to the English royalty, feel about all of this.

I am inexplicably reminded of the Bristol-born physicist Paul Dirac, about whom I read this anecdote in Paul Halpern’s delightful “The Quantum Labyrinth,” a book on physicists and their lives. Dirac was notoriously (or, famously?) reticent. He was most likely to answer yes or no, no matter what questions were posed to him. One story of his reluctance to speak full sentences involved his wife, Manci, who also happened to be the sister of Eugene Wigner, another physicist. At a gathering, Dirac introduced his wife as the “sister of Wigner,” implying that he didn’t know her otherwise. Luckily, brevity and simplicity are friends in physics and mathematics. But not so much in royalty and the affairs of the state. If Her Majesty keeps up this “dignified part” that Bagehot neatly described, we might as well christen her Elizabeth the Silent.

I’ve been watching a fair amount of Star Trek in the last few months. The last series I watched, back in the early 1990s when I was still new to America, was Deep Space Nine (the best Trek till date, in my book). CBS has added two series in the last few years - Star Trek: Discovery, and Star Trek: Picard, both of which are riveting and worth watching. The Star Trek franchise has always struck a deeper chord within me, much more so than the Star Wars one. For the longest time, I thought of Star Trek and Star Wars as America’s mythologies, the aspirational fantasies of a fledgling society. The more I’ve thought through them, the more I’m inclined to look on them as the exact opposite, sort of “anti-mythologies,” if you will. Gene Rodenberry, the show’s creator, had a vision that was created from the post-Atomic horror of Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the World War. It illustrates that if mankind is to survive, we must unite in a very fundamental way. The latest series - Discovery and Picard - are extensions of that vision. Though a little more histrionic and melodramatic than usual Treks, they reach for profundity with confidence. They are Treks that take place, for the first time, in broken worlds. No more are there benign bureaucracies of yore waiting to be saved from invaders, bad apples and disasters. They explore the ideas of salvage and redemption. The idea that we must make the most of what we have in a world in which there is increasingly less to be found. Commander Data muses (in a memorable cameo), “Peace, love, friendship. These are precious, because we know they cannot endure.”

Live long and prosper, my friends. Stay safe and have a great week ahead.