Harry and Meghan’s moral exile
by Giles Fraser, UnHerd:
The couple embodies the ethics of narcissism.
Harry and Meghan divide opinion very much along the lines of whether one believes we have obligations beyond our control. I still remember a Christmas family row, me a stroppy teenager, that concluded with me insisting: “I didn’t ask to be born into this family.” No one ever does, of course. Which is why the putative obligations one has to one’s parents — “honour thy father and mother” in old money — cut against the grain of contemporary liberal choice-led values.
The history of how this idea of individual choice came to dominate our moral landscape is complex and interesting. What began as a worthy cry of individual freedom against exploitative elites — the state, the medieval church and so on — greatly exceeded its intended power, eventually becoming a weapon that could bend reality around the will of individual choice. These days, for example, I can be a woman simply if I choose to be one, irrespective of any biological givenness. Philosophically, this means there are no givens that human will cannot and should not be able to overcome. Truth requires a possessive pronoun, making it submissive to individual will: my truth. All that matters is the choosing. There is only one core moral situation and that is when I point to something and say: “I want it”. The paradigmatic setting for moral reflection has shifted from kneeling in the church pew to standing in the shopping aisle.
[…] We could call this the “Montecito perspective”, but Marx explained it best: “All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.” The Netflix Queen, luxuriating in her ghastly Californian mansion, is a surprising example of precisely what Marx described — her exaggerated bow to the monarch making a mockery of the respect that such a gesture is designed to articulate.
This is why the “Montecito perspective” contrasts so directly with the “Buckingham Palace perspective”, which is what makes the whole Harry/William drama so much more than a mimetic rivalry between siblings. They are archetypes of two fundamental and bitter political adversaries: very roughly, tradition and the ethics of the market, old world power and new world power, England and America. People will keep on making programmes about Harry and Meghan not because they are intrinsically worth watching, nor because they provide us with any new information about their perfectly ordinary romance, but rather because they reference a very primitive kind of disagreement about the nature of moral reality. Harry and Meghan are compelling in their own way because they are absolute true believers in the kind of moral vision they propound. In direct contrast, many believe that what they think of as being good is the very thing we now need saving from: an ethics indistinguishable from narcissism. The crack between us reaches down to the very bottom.
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