One thing I cannot stand is something I’ve started to call ‘black and white’ thinking’. This may not be exactly the best term for it – ‘blinkered’ thinking might be a more accurate term perhaps – but it’s what I call it when people don’t know a lot about a topic, but seize on one aspect of it (usually a negative one) and allow that to completely colour their judgement of said topic, to the exclusion of anything positive or nuanced; indeed, a lack of nuance is characteristic of ‘black and white thinking’.
There are a few recent situations where this manner of thinking has made itself very, and tiresomely, apparently. I tend to see it in discussions relating to the monarchy and Commonwealth, whether in the British or the Canadian contexts (the two contexts I feel most competent in speaking about; previous posts have addressed people’s assumptions about both institutions in both contexts), or in historical contexts more generally.
In 2018, Victoria City Council decided to remove a statue of Sir John A. MacDonald from a public square in the centre of Victoria. Sir John was the first prime minster of Canada, so it makes sense that he has statutes up across the country. He was also, however, involved in establishing the residential school system, an institution that tried to eradicate First Nations ways of life and resulted in many cases of abuse, the effects of which are felt even today. But this aspect of MacDonald’s legacy needs to be set in the wider context of his life, because he was known for other things besides just the residential schools. As I have said, he was the first Prime Minister of the Dominion of Canada; he also played a central role in Confederation in, and after, 1867, and in expanding the railway across Canada and bringing more provinces into Confederation, i.e. what is now Canada. He was also responsible for policies relating to Indigenous issues, because he was Prime Minster and the minister of Indian Affairs, as it was then known, and those policies included establishing the residential schools and displacing First Nations communities so that the railways could go ahead. Of course these are negative things, and they are not the only controversial elements of MacDonald’s life. But he played a central role in creating the foundations of the Canada we know today, and that in itself is historically significant. By focussing only on the negative, Victoria City Council took a very heavy-handed, broad-brush-stroke approach and completely removed his statute, when the sensible thing to do would have been to change the plaque accompanying the statute, in order to provide a fuller picture of MacDonald’s life, good and bad. Yes, people can and should learn about him from places other than his statute, but let’s have that statute serve an edifying purpose, too, if it’s there in public view anyway. Educate, not eradicate, is what I would say in this kind of situation. Apparently this approach may yet go ahead, however, according to a news article from 2020 (linked at the bottom), so I am somewhat encouraged.
I am heartily sick of people seizing on relatively small or isolated negative things about the monarchy and using them to come to the conclusion that the entire monarchy must somehow be terrible. The big example here is of course Charles and Diana: people don’t want Prince Charles to be king in the future because of what happened with Diana. But do they have any clue about what else there is to Charles? He does a lot in his role as Prince of Wales, much of which he doesn’t actually have to do: there are his (many) initiatives to support sustainability and the environment, his push for greater understanding between different faiths, his vision generally of how Britain and the Commonwealth can be better: I have immense respect for his ideals, and I’ve linked his official website at the bottom so you can have a proper browse, because there’s a lot that he does. But no, because Diana had such a hard time adjusting to life within the Royal Family and because she and Charles could not make their marriage work, this apparently means that Charles and his whole family are somehow terrible. Think this through, friends – why are people arriving at these conclusions? A lot of it is ignorance.
Another recent example is with Prince Andrew – black and white thinking dictates that because he (one member of the family) once had associations with a convicted sex offender, the entire monarchy must therefore be ‘bad’ (I suspect some people want Andrew to be guilty somehow, as an excuse to discredit the monarchy, but again, it’s coming from a place of ignorance). Sensible, informed, thinking would suggest that Prince Andrew, specifically, just him and not the rest of the royal family who were not involved in this, made some poor choices here. The rest of the monarchy can continue to get on with things, despite the dire and uninformed predictions of some of the media that Andrew has somehow tarnished the entire royal reputation.
A further obvious and recent example is the Sussexes’ interview with Oprah: that interview. Ignorant thinking dictates that because Meghan had a such a hard time adjusting to her new life, and experienced trouble with her mental health, the entire monarchy is somehow cruel and heartless. Sensible, informed thinking would say that one’s mental health is important, and if someone is struggling as Meghan says she was, that should be taken seriously and addressed, but not that the entire institution of monarchy needs dismantling. Honestly, the suggestions in some of the newspapers that Canada should sever its ties with the monarchy because of the revelations in that interview are utterly groundless.
This interview also led the uninformed to automatically assume that the entire Royal Family must be racist – how can this be, when you think of the Commonwealth, and how racially diverse it is, that the Queen and her family so strongly support and encourage? It doesn’t add up. We know that one, unnamed, family member, made that comment about Archie’s skin colour. But people see trouble with one or two members of the royal family, and they pounce and let assumptions cloud their thinking.
Another tiresome thing people sometimes do is when they see that some attention is being paid to the monarchy, they bring up something that is only tangentially relevant just to try and…well, I’m not even sure what they are trying to accomplish. And they do so out of ignorance. I remember taking part in a Victoria Day parade with the Monarchist League once, and as soon as we passed him, some guy yelled out ‘what about Fergie?’, or some similar nonsense. Why, though? What was going through this guy’s head that he thought *that* was the thing to say? The Duchess of York had indeed just been in the news for something, I don’t remember what, and of course, in typical black-and-white-thinking fashion, that was the connection this random guy in the crowd made when he saw the word ‘monarchist’: something he’d seen in the news about one person with a connection to the Royal Family, taken out of context, and used to heckle the monarchy and its supporters. I am absolutely done with this kind of behaviour. Enough of that.
I have also encountered some really disrespectful reactions to the death of the Duke of Edinburgh, ranging from the flippant to the downright callous. All of them revolved around one of two things, usually the ‘racist remarks’, and to a lesser degree, the car crash in which he was involved a few years back. The latter they decry as the actions of some entitled old rich guy who can get away with anything, and the former they take to mean that the Duke and all of his family were racist. They completely ignore the extraordinary life the Duke of Edinburgh lived, the causes he championed and the institutions of which he was patron, and of course, all of the support he has given to the Queen in a job I bet none of those critics could actually do. Prince Philip was responsible for modernising and economising the way the royal residences were run, he’s behind the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award (8 million of which have been awarded worldwide), he was the first president of the World Wildlife Fund, he had a keen interest in industry, design, and the environment, to name a few things; he had a distinguished naval career, and was committed to the Commonwealth and its aims, visiting 50 out of 54 of the Commonwealth countries. Yes, some of the things Prince Philip is recorded to have said were very politically incorrect, but that does not automatically mean that he was a racist, or somehow this terrible person. Again we have the black and white thinking, seizing on one thing, small in the grand scheme of things (in this case, small in the scheme of Prince Philip’s long and full life), and using it to make sweeping judgements not only of him, but his whole family as well. It’s as if ‘because he said these things, we have to write off the entire monarchy’, and to that I say, no, we don’t.
In the Commonwealth Realms, the Queen is represented by the Governor General at the federal level (there are lieutenant governors at the provincial level). In Canada, our Governor General recently resigned. I won’t go into depth here – it was largely to do with reports she’d bullied her staff – but the point here is that she was not well-suited to the job of vice-regal representative. She had accepted her appointment without the government having properly vetted her for it. What does ignorant black and white thinking tell us here? That clearly, because one Governor General, out of the twenty-nine that Canada has had, was not a good fit for the job and resigned, we need to rethink our entire relationship with the monarchy. What does sensible, informed, thinking tell us? That, first of all, rethinking our entire relationship with the monarchy actually means overhauling our entire system of government, and also that we should simply find a different Governor General who is a good fit for the job, as we’ve been able to do before. That’s it. No need to get up in arms over the Canadian crown just because of one Governor General. Just appoint a new one, and move on.
The media, of course, play a large role in perpetuating this kind of thinking. They sensationalise and distort everything so that yes, the negative stuff is what a lot of people see, and, sadly, blindly believe. I’ve been so disgusted by the headlines on some of the magazines at the checkouts that I’ve turned the magazines the other way round… And of course people are entitled to their opinions, but those opinions are far more likely to be taken seriously if they are informed, and if they are put into perspective. This applies to anyone, although I am particularly disappointed to see otherwise intelligent people going down the road of letting one negative thing colour their opinion with such a lack of nuance and understanding. If you are, for example, an anti-monarchist, I will not agree with you on that issue, though I will be able to tolerate this difference of opinion much more if you’ve thought about why you think about it the way you do. But if you’ve just thought along the lines of, ‘oh, Prince Philip said some racist things therefore I am against the monarchy,’ then I encourage you to think a little deeper.
Further Reading
For more information on the life of the Duke of Edinburgh (and indeed, all of the working members of the Royal Family), have a look through http://royal.uk
For information on Prince Charles’ work, see http://princeofwales.gov.uk
On the subject of Sir John A MacDonald, see https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/sir-john-alexander-macdonald and for the somewhat encouraging update on his statute, https://www.timescolonist.com/news/local/the-fate-of-the-sir-john-a-macdonald-statue-a-future-teaching-tool-1.24098339 (though I cannot find anything more recent than this).
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