High life | 23 April 2011

New York

How fair a rule is monarchy? A Byzantine scholar wrote that it was the fairest, to the point that God sustained it, as long as the emperors were elected by the army or an aristocratic senate. With their coronation, legitimate successors and usurpers alike automatically became sacred. The ancient Greeks went a step further. They did not require a god-like sustenance nor perfection from their kings, only greatness. Agamemnon, Menelaus, Odysseus, Achilles, Leonidas — they were all great kings but not perfect human beings.

Practical Romans distrusted Greek morality about kings and heroes, and in Marcus Aurelius they produced the supreme type of philosopher-king that Plato had merely dreamed of. Marcus wrote in his Meditations: ‘One should rule in accordance with reason, in obedience to Providence, in the service of his subjects.’ (Just like the self-appointed King of Kings, the scumbag Gaddafi.) Poor old Marcus, his reign was one disaster after another. Treason, a terrible plague, war and bankruptcy. He sacrificed his own life to preserve the vain life of his subjects. So much for good intentions.

The modern world has put water in its wine — an old Greek expression — and kings and queens nowadays are mostly constitutional monarchs, except of course in joke countries like Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait and the rest of the tiny kleptocracies with black gold gushing underneath. Late in life I became convinced that a bad constitutional monarch is nevertheless superior to a good president. Modern politics have poisoned our system to such an extent that only a non-elected monarch can succeed in uniting the people.

Look at Japan, and how the emperor managed to keep a twice-nuked country suffering terrible losses after the war from turning into a Somalia. Sure, the Japanese people are homogeneous, hard-working and extremely disciplined.