Dear Harry and Meghan: do stop preaching. Just cheer us up
Public figures ought to have the good sense not to lecture the public. Sermonising about how lesser mortals should lead their lives is best left to the clergy, for whom it is meant to be a vocation rather than a pastime. It is particularly unwise for those who owe their elevated status to birth or beauty, rather than merit, to preach de haut en bas to those less fortunate than themselves.
The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are popular members of the Royal Family — and for good reason. He is a brave pilot who has risked his life for his country in Afghanistan, while she is an elegant ambassador for Anglo-American amity. But these achievements are modest compared to their privileges. With the responsibility of royalty comes the duty to keep one’s opinions to oneself, or risk alienating those subjects who don’t share the opinions but do pay for the privileges.
Does Meghan Markle suppose that she would be guest editing Vogue if she had not married a prince? Was she well advised to pick 15 female “forces for change” to appear on a magazine cover, some of whom are highly controversial?
Not everyone admires Jacinda Aherne, the Prime Minister of New Zealand, just because she is young and had a baby in office. She’s a politician (of the Left, naturally) and it is simply wrong for a supposedly apolitical minor royal to endorse her. It would be no less wrong for the Duchess to have put Theresa May or Diane Abbott on the cover.
The same applies to Jane Fonda, a Hollywood actress and weight guru who has been a mascot of the Left ever since she took her anti-Vietnam War protests to extremes that still offend many veterans today. As for Greta Thunberg: the teenage climate campaigner is indeed admired by millions, but her political views are as alarming as they are naive. It would be difficult to find anyone less appropriate to receive royal endorsement. It is unthinkable that the Queen would have approved such a use of her family name. One must assume that the Duchess did not bother to consult her.
Far worse, however, was the interview with Dr Jane Goodall conducted by the Duke. In the first place, journalism is a professional skill. To a prince, it may look a lot easier to interview a famous environmentalist than to pilot a helicopter over Taliban lines. But Harry’s journalistic efforts prove that he should stick to flying.
The first rule of reporting is to avoid making oneself the story. So what does our grand inquisitor do? He lets his subject turn the tables on him and suddenly it is he who is the story. Once the Prince starts pontificating about the planet and mentions “having a child and hoping to have children”, Dr Goodall cleverly interjects: “Not too many!” Without pausing to think, Harry replies: “Two, maximum!”
Untold damage will be done by this unguarded remark, in a context where it has become an article of faith for ideological climate activists that every child born is one too many. How are families with more than two children supposed to feel? And what gives Harry, whose carbon footprint must be vastly bigger than the average citizen’s, the right to shame others for having a larger family than the ducal couple deems politically correct?
But it gets worse. Once he gets started, there’s no stopping the young chatterbox from demonstrating his newly-acquired woke credentials. He drones on about “unconscious bias” — “something which so many people don’t understand”, including (we may assume) Harry himself before he married Meghan. To a rather dim Duke, the concept of unconscious bias offers an opportunity for right-on one-upmanship: “I’m not saying that you’re racist, I’m just saying that your unconscious bias is proving that, because of the way that you’ve been brought up, the environment you’ve been brought up in, suggests that you have this point of view — unconscious point of view — where naturally you will look at someone in a different way.” How very gratifying for someone who used to think that it was OK to wear a Nazi uniform to a fancy dress party, but who is now the proud husband and father of a mixed race family, to be able to look down on others who are still prisoners of their unconscious bias.
Not that Harry cares, but the intellectual history of the unconscious is a chequered one. It was invented by Eduard von Hartmann, a 19th century German philosopher who was also a “scientific” anti-Semite. Transformed by Sigmund Freud into the fundamental concept of psychoanalysis, the individual unconscious was then extended by his errant disciple Carl Gustav Jung into the “collective unconscious”, with its deep structures or “archetypes”. Such ideas lent themselves to a racial interpretation in Nazi hands.
It is this dubious notion that underlies the current discourse about “unconscious bias”. The idea that we are conditioned by prejudices inherited from a toxic past fuels identity politics, which feeds on guilt and victimhood. For royal pseuds to trespass into this kind of territory is, to say the least, undesirable.
Harry and Meghan should listen to the advice of a scion of a royal family that lost its imperial throne: Eduard Habsburg. Now the Hungarian Ambassador to the Holy See, he tweeted: “… when it comes to having children, ‘the more the merrier’.” After all, having children is one way of doing what the royals do best: cheering up those less fortunate than them.
