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Prince William and the Two Nations

by Christopher Chantrill
August 08, 2005 at 1:51 am

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AFTER ALL the tragedy and heartache in London over 7/7, at least there is some good news. Now that Prince William has got his degree at St. Andrews University, he’s moving back to London and will set up house with his constant companion Kate Middleton. So that’s all right then.

Of course, this is nothing new. Princes of the blood have always lain upon a soft pillow, and there is no reason to stop now. For instance at the turn of the nineteenth century the prince’s namesake, the Duke of Clarence (later King William IV), enjoyed the favors of Mrs. Jordan, the greatest comic actress of the day. But when it came time for the Duke to produce an heir, he married a princess and abandoned Mrs. Jordan to a fate worse than death.

It says something about the discreet charm of the bourgeoisie, not to mention the eternal power of an attractive and intelligent young woman, that handicappers say this is unlikely to happen in the case of Kate Middleton and Prince William.

The tragedy of Mrs. Jordan was performed back in the days of Disraeli’s Two Nations “between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy… the rich and the poor.” At least, there was no intercourse and sympathy when it came to the crunch. As the old song goes:

It’s the same the ’ole world over,
It’s the poor what gets the blame.
It’s the rich what gets the pleasure,
Ain’t it all a bloomin’ shame?

The power of Kate Middleton tells us that it is time to update the hoary old Two Nations concept—and modernize it, as they say in Britain. For the Two Nations of the developed world are no longer the rich and the poor. Not in an age when the “poor” are fatter than the “rich.”

The new division is between what we might call Venture Nation and Tenure Nation. Venture Nation is the community that accepts life as a risk proposition. It recognizes the principle of responsibility and the principle of service. Businesses, marriages, and families are built out of responsibility and purpose, and the glue of personal commitment. And nothing can be achieved without the ethic of service. Life is not all about me; it’s about meeting someone else’s needs, and meeting them willingly. You can see Venture Nation in the life of Kate Middleton. Her parents, according to Matthew Bell in The Spectator, are “energetic business folk, running a highly successful mail-order company called Party Pieces, selling [stuff]… for children’s birthday parties.” The “business is operated from a series of converted barns” in Berkshire. Kate went to a top British public school and then to university at St. Andrews. She “is an entirely ordinary upper-middle-class girl… lineage can’t be traced much further back than the suburbanization of Berkshire.” Not much tenure there.

But then there is Tenure Nation. Tenure Nation regards risk as proof of oppression. It whines “I have my rights” when things go wrong. Whereas the folk in Venture Nation spend other peoples’ money on their businesses and their ventures, spending money that is freely given and usually returning that money with increase, the folk in Tenure Nation are different. In Tenure Nation they also spend other peoples’ money. But the money is not given freely in a contract between equals. It is money taken by force, usually by political power. The people of Tenure Nation occupy the government offices, the government schools, the government universities, the government social services, the government “enterprises,” and they browse upon government entitlements and benefits. And they have Tenure. Prince William belongs to Tenure Nation, as a second in line to a hereditary job with tenure. But there is hope for him if he can learn the Venture Nation culture of sensible Kate Middleton from Berkshire.

The Muslim immigrants who came to Britain a generation ago belonged to Venture Nation. They put their lives at hazard to create a new life in a new country. But their children have been “thrown,” to use Heidegger’s term, into Tenure Nation, condemned to indifferent schooling in Britain’s “bog-standard” comprehensives and exposed to the depravities of Britain’s lager louts. Not surprisingly, they view Britain’s youth with contempt. Yet they have learned to whine “I have my rights” with the best of them. As Minette Marrin writes in the London Sunday Times, there is a connection between the decadence of British public life “and the miserable failure of Britain’s schools; illiteracy here is beyond belief, disruptive behavior is normal, exams and degrees have been debased,” and social mobility “has declined in the past 30 years.”

Unfortunately Britain does not enjoy a conservative movement like the United States that champions the culture of Venture Nation and actually proposes to do something about the whining adolescents of Tenure Nation. But at least it has Kate Middleton.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

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Responsibility

Seeckt: "to make of each individual member of the army a soldier who, in character, capability, and knowledge, is self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility [verantwortungsfreudig] as a man and a soldier."
MacGregor Knox et. al., The dynamics of military revolution, 1300-2050

Living the Virtues

When recurrently the tradition of the virtues is regenerated, it is always in everyday life, it is always through the engagement by plain persons in a variety of practices, including those of making and sustaining families and households, schools, clinics, and local forms of political community.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

Never Trust Experts

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

presented by Christopher Chantrill

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