“Where men are forbidden to honour a king they honour
millionaires, athletes, or film-stars instead: even famous prostitutes or
gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it
food and it will gobble poison.” - C.S. Lewis
CSL channelling The Speng, there.
ReplyDeleteOh right, do you think it's a sample? They are not quite contemporaries right, I think CS Lewis was about 20 years younger.
ReplyDeleteI don't think it's a sample, but the pithy contempt for modernity is from the same mould. Of course Spengler would have worked up to that line with a five paragraph fulmination on the mediocrity of late classical Greece.
ReplyDeleteWhy should we take this seriously?
ReplyDeleteBecause it's true?
DeleteIt seems true to me - in fact I independently came up with the 'fame as modern royalty' thought myself and then was annoyed to find out it had been thought many times before! It came from watching a reality show about people who wanted to be Rolling Stone critics (yeah, go figure - it only lasted one season). One of the characters reports on a red carpet event and accosts Paris Hilton and her mom with the groveling, forelock-tugging remark: "iconic family... royalty to me". I was like, "oh, it's so obvious".
You only have to look at the political scene in America to see that a huge swathe of the country doesn't seem to realise it's a constitutional republic, there's this great thirst for a monarch - and for dynasties (all those fantasies about JFK Jnr not being dead and returning to do a double-ticket with Trump - or RFK Jnr doing a joint ticket with Trump).
It's right there on the surface of showbiz - the way that Elvis was the King, Aretha the Queen of Soul, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, all those reggae sound system bosses with names like King this or Duke that.
I suppose C.S. Lewis' implication that it is noble and right to honour a monarch is what really flossed my punani. A main distinction between the admiration bestowed on a king and the admiration bestowed on, say, an athlete is that the latter is based on the athlete's achievements. Indeed, that the Windsors are such a crowd of runts only adds insult to injury.
DeleteThree US presidents have been the sons or grandsons of former presidents: John Quincy Adams, Benjamin Harrison and George W. Bush. Not that much of an advert for the advantages of a scion, is it?
As a counterexample, James Brown was the Funky President.
Think Lewis's point is about the spiritual aspect of monarchy rather than the hierarchical one. Back in the days of absolute monarchy the King or Queen were (literally) God's representative on Earth, and therefore infused with real spiritual force, whether they were "good" monarchs or bad. The reduction of today's monarchs to being mere figureheads means that they have forfeited their spiritual force at least as much as their political power. It is this that allows the aforesaid spiritual force to be adopted/usurped by various minstrels, players and bladder kickers.
DeleteNor are showbiz and sport necessarily any more egalitarian than the monarchy - the adulation of Lionel Messi's mad skillz is dependent on a vast corporate media hype machine whose ulterior purpose is to drive the plebs into penury by relentlessly persuading them to funnel their cash into Paddy Power. Showbiz and sport are both ultimately vampiric.
Also, Lewis is hinting that Weber was wrong to posit the world as being disenchanted. All that has happened is that the enchantment has taken new and unexpected forms.
Hieratic rather than hierarchical.
DeleteThe Enlightenment never really happened. Or at least it was a local event, restricted to certain strata of the population. In other, larger parts of the populace, magical thinking and the monarchical impulse persist.
Even with the educated strata of avowedly rational actors and the scientific minded, not far from the surface lurks the capacity for magical thinking. Like a different compartment of consciousness.