Has the heir to the British throne gone cuckoo and turned on his class, like a scorpion poisoning itself, or is he shining a bright light into the future?
To mention the Prince of Wales, Charles Windsor, is to stir up many reactions, especially in progressive, populist, socialist circles. Of course he is the beneficiary of an old, anti-democratic class system. He is a wealthy, large landowner, but hasn't done the sort of hard work you and I have to do to earn our way, pay our bills. His passport lists his occupation as: Prince of the United Kingdom of Great Britain.
It is as hard to discern good sense from such a tangle in our purportedly democratic times as it is to sit down and listen to the confection called Al Quaeda, a conglomeration really of people who want Western imperialism to get out of their regions, homelands, communities.
James Baldwin noted we call people "terrorists," and such, in order to dismiss their humanity; we can cease listening to them. I admit my progressive peers would be just as dismissive - with good, historical reasons - of this man whose only job is to wait for his mother to die.
The problem is with Prince Charles is that we have too many things all figured out. Baldwin's "terrorist" is, in this case, "a prince." End of discussion. yes, maybe. But this cut-and-dry, knee-jerk reaction pretends we haven't benefited from class-traitors and race-traitors and gender-benders to move the needle. And these revolutionaries don't exclusively become green shoots of grass in our blessed Western democracies. Lately, we are just a vast dust-bowl in the "greatest country in the history of the world."
Prince Charles had to have caught my eye before the Facing the Future keynote speech he gave on July 8, 2009. Otherwise, I would never have watched it.
He has been first, for me, a proponent of alternative medicine (called complementary medicine in the UK), especially homeopathy. Bernard Shaw described homeopathy to a layperson as: while a modern doctor (allopath) washes the dirty cat a homeopath soils the cat so it learns to clean itself. After almost 20 years of stronger and stronger prescriptions medicines for seasonal allergies that lasted half the year, I turned to a homeopath who, in two years of treatments, cured most of my symptoms. No more sprays. No more steroids.
Prince Charles infamously hurled a criticism at some proposed improvements to London architecture, and killed the project, causing the Establishment to wail that he had crossed a line, abused his influence. He has not only advocated but provided funds to construct live-work communities, where people can walk to their jobs and where some streets are forbidden cars.
He is not only a farmer but also an organic farmer, lucid in the harms of pesticides and chemical fertilizers, and an opponent of genetically modified foods.
Seeing the writing on the wall in multi-cultural Britain, he recently said as king he would like to be known as Defender of Faiths (since Henry VIII, British monarchs are known as "defender of the Faith," a title bestowed on Henry by the pope). But Charles was quickly rebuked by the country's most prominent prelate, the archbishop of Canterbury: worldly Charles was informed that the Anglican path was the only path for him as a future king, which takes a great deal of disciplined ignorance when one looks at not only modern Britain but our modern, creole, nations.
In his "Facing the Future" speech, he touches on themes that he has stirred up over the last generation and only employed new metaphors in the hope we finally get it.
So he reaches back 500 years to Henry VIII to cast him as a sort of Green King. Henry, relates Prince Charles, established the Royal Navy but understood the threat to the forests such rapid building of ships took, so a law was passed to protect forest growth in proportion to the building of that navy.
"What was instinctively understood by many in King Henry’s time was the importance of working with the grain of Nature to maintain the balance between keeping the Earth’s natural capital intact and sustaining humanity on its renewable income.
"It is this knowledge that I fear we have lost in our rush to pursue unlimited economic growth and material wealth – a loss that was never more rapid than during the 1960’s and at that time a frenzy of change swept the world in the wave of post-war Modernism."
The Establishment is correct to protest: a train wreck is in the making. The modern British monarchy has survived in part because it has stayed out of open-arena politics. What opinions does the Queen have about anything? The Establishment wonders how a King Charles is to deal with a nominally elected government, read its speeches, while he parades around the UK speaking against those very same government policies; and that he has a long record of testimony that run at cross-purposes to these policies.
What is so ironic about the Establishment's dust-up is that it is precisely what progressives find wrong with our current modern society with undue powers afforded to unelected corporations. No one elected the Establishments of the UK or US, but there they are, keeping national health care off the table and a ferocious blockade on Revolutionary Cuba. So it is interesting Charles is singled out for "undue influence," while the reactionary wing of the establishment gets a pass by the likes of the Guardian Newspaper.
Has our industrial society become a Frankenstein Monster that threatens its creators?
"Facing the future, therefore, requires a shift from a reductive, mechanistic approach to one that is more balanced and integrated with Nature’s complexity – one that recognizes not just the build up of financial capital, but the equal importance of what we already have – environmental capital and, crucially, what I might best call 'community capital.' That is, the networks of people and organizations, the post offices and pubs, the churches and village halls, the mosques, temples and bazaars – the wealth that holds our communities together; that enriches people’s lives through mutual support, love, loyalty and identity. Just as we have no way of accounting for the loss of the natural world, contemporary economics has no way of accounting for the loss of this community capital."
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