More than two thousand years of church history and more than a thousand or more of monarchy resonated in…

More than two thousand years of church history and more than a thousand or more of monarchy resonated in every moment of the Queen’s funeral service. A deeply impersonal experience, what we sometimes call ‘formality’. A 🧵on why I think it was a pivotal moment, for Covid too. /1 https://t.co/nM6kCngVJb

That formality is often seen in our iconoclastic age, since the 1960s in particular, as unnecessary stuffiness that needs to be swept away. As the protector of privilege and oppression. But we’ve been here before, even within these traditions. The idol-smashers. /2 https://t.co/yvTcru2PDT

The iconoclastic urge is always driven by the idea of a more ‘authentic’ existence. That resists tradition and custom as somehow stifling and preventing us accessing a more pure truth of life. But when you step back, all it generally is, is the refusal to engage in anything…/3

…that isn’t the present day. A refusal to see that custom and tradition are the inherited lessons from multiple previous generations, compressed into ritual and symbolism and habit. A refusal to have the discipline to use that as the foundation for new innovations. /4

So the iconoclasts force us to relive all of human civilisation in every generation, Except you can’t, so they really just destroy everything. But this is also where I want to talk about Covid, because the greatest iconoclasts of our day are the worshippers of the Economy. /5

The Economy is humankind’s greatest iconoclastic wrecking ball. It’s a name for a brutal process of continuously stripping all of the agency or self-determination from all things, alive and dead, for continuous mobilisation towards a handful of centres of extreme wealth. /6

It’s the old empire methodology, but re-badged in modern pseudoscientific economic terms. Helped by ideological economists who want us to believe we can replace all of human history with a simple equilibrium-seeking market, which removes the need for any custom, tradition…/7 https://t.co/W8R71CxcLD

…or hierarchy. You can’t get more iconoclastic than that, anything at all can only be an obstruction to this grand ‘invisible hand’ equilibration. And speaking of formality, this is mathematical formalism. The formality of a ceremony like the Queen’s funeral is at least…/8

…based in many centuries of human experience. The mathematical formalism of the market isn’t tempered by any of that. Which is why the economisation of the world can be brutal beyond any historical reference point, because it’s ‘objective’ brutality (they say). But to Covid. /9

Humanity has wrestled with plagues as long as it’s had religions and monarchies. Longer. The Bible is full of mention of them. Why humans also invented traditions and customs to deal with them, from the earliest quarantines through to modern public health procedures. /10

The Economy of course has zero tolerance for anything except mobilisation and accumulation, so public health practice has to go as well. The Economy calls it ‘lockdowns’, revealing very clearly that it sees it as it sees all things, as an obstacle in the way of its single…/11

…obsession. Mobilisation. The movement of people and things, and their accumulation in a small handful of centres of wealth. Which (to the economy folk) looks like their lifestyles ‘locked down’. But to finish, I wanted to tap into the great republican debate as well. /12

We’ve all been infected in some way by this modern iconoclasm, beginning in the free love of the 1960s and bizarrely ending up in a mathematical deity of equilibrium diagrams. The urge to replace a monarchy with a republic is more idol-smashing, the unthinking urge to…/13

…replace the idol with some more ‘authentic’ new. I think we probably should decouple from the British monarchy, but I’m much more concerned about what happens then. Because simply coming up with ‘our own head of state’ to me is not going to do anything except create a…/14

…homegrown King or Queen of some description, minus the moderating custom and tradition that surrounds existing monarchies. As has happened with the American Presidency, in their republic. And this is where living in Australia gives us an opportunity that is unprecedented. /15

Because when it comes to custom and tradition, Australia is world champion, and by such a large margin it’s embarrassing to the rest of the world. Our indigenous population managed something no other culture has, tens of thousands of years of sustainable civilisation. /16

No other culture managed even a tenth of that longevity. We desperately need to understand how our indigenous people did it, and that work is underway, and we can only hope the knowledge is not lost. The push for reconciliation to me is about that more than anything,…/17

…about respecting their culture enough to be in awe at what they did, and to want to know how. To let them lead us for once, because we’re comparative simpletons. Restorative justice, of sorry, but also of ‘um, how did you do that, that’s amazing’. /18

I’ve Tweeted before that our Head of State should be (from what we understand anyway) what it was for those tens of thousands of years already. The land or landscape, both poor words but we have no equivalent for this extraordinarily sophisticated cultural concept. /19

Our indigenous people again need to lead us much more than we need to lead them, the paternalistic way we sometimes think of saying sorry as like a sop to our past sins. Rather than us having the humility to recognise genius beyond any measure we have. The feeling of sacred…/20

…history and tradition in the Queen’s funeral is utterly dwarfed by the land we inhabit, a miracle of all human civilisation. But we’re not equipped to see it. It may also be our only chance of survival, to start that learning. /end