No More Black-and-White Thinking

I would love to write a nice, calm, blog post walking you through Victoria, or pointing out some of the off-the-beaten-track stuff that I love about York, or something like that. But black-and-white thinking continues to frustrate me, so here we are. 

If you’ve read one of my previous posts, you’ll know about the thing that I call black-and-white thinking, or blinkered thinking. This is where people look at a topic they don’t know much about, seize on one aspect of it that looks negative but which they might not fully understand in context, and use that to justify their opposition to said topic, with no element of nuance in their thinking. I tend to see this quite a lot when it comes to the monarchy and the Commonwealth.

The point of these kinds of posts is to get people thinking about how they view the monarchy and the Commonwealth, institutions that both have excellent intentions nowadays, but which people decide they need to dismantle and ‘cancel’ because of what they were like in the past. Soon, I hope, we can get back to posting history content that doesn’t cause me so much stress, but I must get this out of my system first. 

I recently read a thing in the news about some students in an Oxford college who voted to remove the Queen’s picture from their common room because apparently it was a symbol of colonialism. I wanted to leave this alone, as the heavy-handed work of people who didn’t have all the facts, and not give it any attention, but I cannot. This is typical black-and-white thinking. 

Say it with me, friends: our current Queen is not a straightforward symbol of colonialism. One could make this connection for previous monarchs, but to say that our current monarch is such a symbol is to conflate, and fundamentally misunderstand the difference between, the British Empire and the current Commonwealth. The Queen has only had an integral role in the latter of these institutions. 

Of course terrible things have been carried out in the name of the British Empire (and other empires as well, of course, but we’re dealing with the British one right now); one would be extremely foolish to pretend otherwise. Does the empire exist today? No, although some of its negative consequences are still with us. Is the Commonwealth one of those negative consequences? No: it continues to do good and grow in a more positive direction than the empire did. The Queen, our monarch right now, has practically grown up with the Commonwealth, and throughout her life has promoted its values of peace, democracy, and prosperity, its growth, and its very existence. She is not some tyrannical head of an imperial regime, she is the head, unanimously agreed as such, of a voluntary organisation whose values are nothing like those of the former empire. Many Commonwealth countries are the same as those that were colonies within the empire, but the whole purpose of the Commonwealth today is totally different.

The monarch’s role is above politics, yet still central to where a government’s authority comes from: this non-partisan figure is meant to be a focus for a broad, inclusive, allegiance that is bigger than politics. The monarch protects and preserves stability, unity, and the things we have in common, while the elected politicians deal with the things on which we can’t always  agree. This is the case in any of the Commonwealth Realms (though of course in the Realms the Queen herself is represented by a Governor General, but the structure is broadly the same). But, it seems, some people can’t look past the fact that this symbol of stability is a wealthy white woman who inherited that role from her wealthy white father, and they automatically think that it must be wrong. As I have said in a previous post, none of this is automatically wrong: the Queen has stepped into her roles as Head of State and Head of the Commonwealth and has conscientiously devoted her life to it, going a long to way to presenting the monarchy in a positive light for many people. Her lifelong ‘job’ – from which she has never retired – has not been just some sinecure.

In Canada (though other Realms probably have this problem as well), many people will look at the monarchy and think that because it is based in the UK, that the Queen is a foreign head of state about whom only people with British ancestry actually care. This is not so! The Queen, remember, is Queen of Canada (or of Australia, or of New Zealand, or of any of the Commonwealth Realms) just as much as she is Queen in the UK. Also, as a figure who is there to represent that which unites us, the monarch is there to represent everyone in Canada, no matter where they are from. The same goes for any of the Realms, including the UK.  

The way the monarchy is presented to the public also contributes to a lot of misunderstanding. It is often done in a way that is either unhelpful for, or actively detrimental to, people’s understanding of what the monarchy actually does. When you highlight how old this institution is, and the traditions it upholds, people think it’s somehow outdated. When you present the various members of the royal family in the same light as modern celebrities, following their lives and fashion choices, it both puts them on a pedestal and trivialises them. It doesn’t, in other words, tend to present an accurate picture of what they ‘do’: it either sensationalises their lives or waters them down. Labelling people who are interested in the monarchy as royal ‘fans’, or ‘royal watchers’, terms I have come to resent, is also not helpful here. I’m certainly interested in what the royal family are doing, but don’t write me off as a ‘royal watcher’ and trivialise my support for, and loyalty to, this institution. Also, don’t look at the word ‘loyalty’ just there and think I’m some sort of sycophant. Mine is an informed loyalty. Yes, such a thing exists. I support constitutional monarchy because I have learned what it is there to do, in the present day, and – coming back to the news item that prompted this post – because the present-day monarchy definitely does not support colonialism. Just because I defend the present-day monarchy, does not mean I condone everything past sovereigns have done or supported. And just because past monarchs supported colonialism, does not mean that the monarchy still does.  

Further Reading

To read the previous posts about the monarchy, the Commonwealth, and ‘black-and-white thinking’, see: https://howitwasbecause.wordpress.com/2021/02/06/de-mystifying-the-monarchy/, https://howitwasbecause.wordpress.com/2021/01/01/clarifying-the-commonwealth/, and https://howitwasbecause.wordpress.com/2021/04/18/just-because-x-doesnt-mean-y/

For more on what the Commonwealth actually does today and why it is not the same as the British Empire, and what the Queen’s role is in this context, see:

www.commonwealth.org 

www.royalcommonwealthsociety.org

www.royal.uk/commonwealth-and-overseas