Why Harry and Meghan Matter

By Cameron Hilditch

Saturday, March 13, 2021

 

Usually, the events that trigger arguments between friends, lovers, and even nations aren’t all that significant in and of themselves. They matter only because they represent or symbolize some larger and more serious issue. Who among us hasn’t, at one point or another, made some small, stupid, and innocuous mistake that has been taken by a loved one as evidence of a deeper character flaw? The argument that begins with a husband forgetting his anniversary isn’t actually about the day itself. It’s about the state of the marriage and about his spousal neglect.

 

The same is true on the historical plane. Many people have been murdered on the streets of Sarajevo over the centuries without global conflagrations ensuing as a result. But when Gavrilo Princip shot the Austrian archduke on a summer’s day in that city over a hundred years ago, all hell broke loose. The deluge that engulfed the world during the subsequent decades had little to do with the fact that one man had peppered the flesh of another with hot lead near Schiller’s delicatessen, just off of the Appel Quay. The perpetrator and the victim had both to be living symbols of nationhood for the governments of the earth to put their manhood on the march in response to a single murder in a distant land.

 

Even though the stakes are infinitesimally small by comparison, the public conduct of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex matters for precisely the same reason. In and of themselves, they are unremarkable people of middling intellect, possessed of little discernible talent. Their politics are boilerplate for the social class they occupy; they’re fond of woke shibboleths and of the boutique pseudo-intellectual fashions of their would-be Hollywood friends, but not of the kind of fully leaded socialism that would strip them of their staggering wealth.

 

But in spite of their personal mediocrity, Harry and Meghan are richly symbolic at several important levels of analysis, not all of which pertain exclusively to British society. It’s tiresome to read the flippant tweets and takes marveling at anyone who takes an interest in this arcane family drama. These two people render intelligible so many social trends and cultural forces that it’s hard for anyone with a long view of history not to be interested in them.

 

Take, for instance, the work that Yuval Levin has recently done on institutions. He’s tracked and analyzed how their basic function has changed over the last generation. Whereas institutions used to be dense, authoritative, and powerful entities to which new members conformed themselves and to which they contributed their talents in the service of some greater goal, they now function as stages upon which individuals perform so as to aggrandize their own personal brands. The political parties in America are an example of this. One used to have to pay one’s dues and take instruction from party grandees for years in order to rise to the top of a party and secure its presidential nomination. In 2016, we saw two insurgents emerge in the form of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders who had no history of loyalty to the party whose nomination they sought. Instead, they turned the parties into PR firms servicing their own personal brands.

 

If you wanted to test Levin’s thesis in extremis on the most authoritative, longstanding, and demanding institution imaginable, you’d test it on the British monarchy. It has been the centerpiece of the British constitution for a millennium. In recent centuries it has demanded a very specific service from its members, and one that is diametrically antithetical to the ethos of the modern world. That service is to have no unique brand, opinion, or even personality when facing the public. The British constitutional settlement demands that the monarch function as the locus of national unity and continuity, above and indifferent to the ephemeral politics of the day.

 

In the United Kingdom, the pageantry and the rituals of patriotism are removed from the political sphere and entrusted to the care of an apolitical sovereign. This has tremendously beneficial effects. The power of nationalist sentiments and patriotic allegiances can be extremely volatile when they are allowed into the political process. Just look at what this does in the United States. Americans feel increasingly that the identity of their country is on the line during every presidential election. This is because the president is not just the chief officer of the executive branch of the federal government. He is the head of state, the commander in chief, the nation’s representative to the rest of the world. He lives in a designated white mansion where people stand whenever he enters the room. All of the trappings of national transcendence are vested in this fundamentally political figure.

 

In the United Kingdom, this is not so. The prime minister is little more than a highly paid civil servant. He lives in a town house in Whitehall which is not even big enough to admit tourists on a regular basis. The volatile emotions that attach themselves to national loyalty are, in Britain, quarantined by the political neutrality of the sovereign. Even if Jeremy Corbyn, the unreconstructed Marxist and former leader of the Labour Party, had won last year’s general election, the United Kingdom would still have been the same country at its most fundamental constitutional level, because he would have been the leader of Her Majesty’s Government.

 

For the monarchy to play this role, it must be strictly neutral and apolitical in all things. Its members must so devote themselves to their duties that when the public looks at them, they see only the institution. The unique person beneath must be entirely submerged to the point at which, from the public perspective, he or she disappears. Only the crown remains. The Netflix series, The Crown, takes many liberties with the historical record, but it captures this aspect of the monarchy perfectly. In fact, everything that separates the respective worldviews of the Sussexes on the one hand and Her Majesty The Queen on the other can be gleaned from this scene alone.

 

The British monarchy, then, is the institution par excellence. The demands that it makes of its members are rivaled only by the military and by monastic life. The root causes of Harry and Meghan’s repudiation of the institution are the same root causes that have young people all over the Western world either abandoning institutions or turning them into financial and reputational prostitution rings.

 

Perhaps the most important root cause of the rot of institutions is the therapeutic approach to life. Put simply, Therapeutic Man thinks that things which make a person feel bad are not to be borne but to be treated. We have to be careful here. Of course, medical conditions (including conditions pertaining to mental health) do require therapy and treatment. But for many millennials like the Sussexes, the therapeutic paradigm has metastasized into an all-encompassing framework for approaching and solving all of life’s problems. Nietzsche said that he who has a why can bear any how, but what happens if the why is the how? That is to say, what if the purpose of life is thought to be the avoidance of suffering per se? What will a person suffer for if suffering itself is thought to be the ultimate evil? Meghan and Harry constantly spoke about what they’d suffered as royals as if this suffering justified their decision to turn on the monarchy in some sort of self-evident way. But other members of the royal family haven’t thought like this. The Queen had to uproot a happy family life in Malta and ask her husband to abandon his naval career when she acceded to the throne. The Duchess of Cambridge spent the better part of a decade being tortured by the tabloids (and without a royal protection detail) before marrying Prince William. If either of these two women had conceived of life in a fundamentally therapeutic way, they might not have chosen the paths they did. There are certainly less stressful lines of work.

 

Therapeutic Man, in any case, is certainly not suited to institutional life. He considers himself to be a victim first and foremost, taking every hardship as an occasion to retreat inward into the self so as to nurse the ego back to health. Institutional life demands the opposite course of action: to accept suffering voluntarily as a way of advancing the cause (whatever it may be) and to look outward for consolation — to the institution’s lofty purpose — rather than inward, toward one’s own neuroses.

 

Since, for Therapeutic Man, suffering cannot be imbued with meaning or purpose, alleviating it must be the ultimate aim and achievement of the life well-lived. For this reason, any and all forms of selfishness can be recast as “self-care” or “putting my own well-being first.” Consider, for instance, the incredible fact that Harry and Meghan thought it reasonable to demand the salary and the protection detail of working royals even after they had stopped working as full-time royals. Prince Harry, a 36-year-old man, described himself as having been “financially cut-off” by the Palace’s eminently reasonable decision not to let he and his wife have their cake and eat it.

 

Those of a therapeutic mindset are inclined to think of their own quest for peace of mind as the central moral drama in life. Or, to put it differently, they make everything about themselves. Consider the bald-faced lie that Meghan Markle told Oprah Winfrey about her son Archie’s HRH (His Royal Highness) status. According to Meghan, the royal family deliberately singled out her son and withheld this title — and the accompanying protection detail — from him. She also intimated that race played a role in this refusal. None of this is true. Pursuant to documents signed by the Queen’s grandfather, George V, Harry and Meghan’s son was never in line for HRH status. Even some of the Queen’s grandchildren haven’t been accorded it. Either someone at the palace failed to explain this adequately to the Duchess of Sussex, or she is deliberately lying to the public.

 

In either case, when Therapeutic Man’s (or, in this case, Therapeutic Woman’s) peace of mind is disturbed, it is never, in their eyes, incidental. The starring role they accord themselves in life’s drama makes everything that affects them appear as if it were done with them in mind. Everything good is taken to be fully deserved approbation and everything inconvenient is greeted as if it were accompanied by malice aforethought. Every institution has people like this who, when asked to do something unpleasant, respond as if they have just been subjected to a personal insult. It’s clear that Meghan would prefer to believe that racial abuse is the reason her son is not a prince, rather than the fact that he ranks unluckily low in the line of succession.

 

All in all, Harry and Meghan have provided something more for us than scandalous gossip. They’ve shown that while self-care and the therapeutic sensibility are important supplements to a good life and to a healthy society, they destroy institutional life once they become the dominant value system operant in society. We need social mores that take us out of ourselves and direct us toward higher purposes. The narcissism of the Sussexes is only the latest evidence that these mores are in short supply. Only let their social vision flourish, and the Western world will soon be reduced to a loose confederation of group-therapy sessions.