Perfectly Balanced

As all things should be

A Question of Balance by the Duke of Edinburgh

I make, the Duke of Edinburgh says in his introduction to this book, no claims to be a philosopher. But occasionally, he continues, in paraphrase, I get invited to things and invited, doubly, to offer an address.

On certain themes of my own choosing.

I may as well, he does not say but might as well say, give people a bit of what I think about those issues of social relevance, mightn’t I? And as consort, and prince, someone could always be found eventually to publish a collection, a thing of this kind. This still is the United Kingdom, after all.

This is still Britain.

I (this is the reviewer speaking) make no claims to having bought this book or even to having heard of it before I inherited it, and a large number of other volumes, from the estate of a very generous man with tastes a few decades older than mine. But once something like this falls into my hands, I always read it. I love essay collections; I love collections of lectures and speeches. They are so episodic, so broken up. It’s almost like reading a mix of stories told by someone you know vaguely, or an seeing old anthology series on television or hearing one on the radio.

And nothing ages faster than a collection like this. It drips with the feel of the past; there’s nothing forward looking about it. And that’s what interests me. I love the past. It’s so much more interesting than dull, miserable modernity.

We expect collections of speeches to have consistent theme. Perhaps they are built of a series of lectures, a famous series of lectures, lectures that are often collected into books. This collection is not that. It is a series of remarks, made because that is the kind of thing consorts of the Queen are expected to do, which only loosely group by theme, which only sometimes have strong arguments.

What are those arguments? In part, the Duke argues that modernity in the mid-to-late part of the previous century, in the Cold War (not the one we are waging now, but the first one), was not satisfactory. That it left too many behind. That science was progressing but humanity was not. Or not necessarily.

He did not quite say that we have to time to stop and stare, but something along that line.

Is this an important, indeed, a vital thing to think? No. Is it something we all need to hear? Again, no. That said, it is not as if the prince did not read, did not have an above average access to intelligent and interesting people, and did not have as much capacity to form an opinion than the average well-read man — and a whole staff on hand and on call to polish up speeches.

And in the eyes of the historian even the average man is interesting. So why not the consort of the monarch of the day?

When the Duke writes, therefore, that our mastery of the machine has perhaps lead us to believe that everything in life — personal, personnel, morale, everything — is susceptible to mechanistic, mathematical analysis, it’s possible to say that this is an ordinary opinion of someone vaguely discomfited by modernity, unsure of where it was all heading, as everyone is if they live long enough. And thus dismissed.

Rich people always have thoughts about the state of society at large. Privileged people ditto. Titled people doubly ditto, at least in Britain.

But if someone like an Austrian School economist, or a behavioural scientist, or TikTok sensation and Spectator columnist Rory Sutherland, says that the human mind is not rational, that human society cannot be boiled down to a series of inputs and outputs and to pure rationality — essentially the same view — this idea is suddenly, and justifiably, worth a hearing.

Some of the Duke’s claims are pretty specific: he says that Karl Marx and his followers, for instance, appear to have replaced the virtues of honesty and gratitude with those of hatred and suspicion. (Readers can make up their own minds.) Like all royals, even ones who have seen war as the Duke did, he talks quite a bit about peace — social, civil, in world affairs. Talks it up. He is of the generation who built the United Nations, after all.

Most pointedly perhaps, the Duke says that it is the truth that ought to concern us: the real truth, the verifiable truth; the truth that does not have one precise right answer following a single mathematical method, but the truth which needs from us profound honest and uprightness if it is to be found and captured.

And why not?

‘Peace, love and beauty cannot be obtained by falsehood,’ he writes.

I agree. It’s why they’re all in such short supply in this evil world of ours. A world so full of liars, a world so lacking in shame.