To the manner born
Good old Charles, always stirring the pot, and doing it in such a grand aristocratic irresponsible way.
“I was accused once of being the enemy of the Enlightenment,” he told a conference at St James’s Palace. “I felt proud of that.”
Ah did you, you darling wee man. Well it’s easy for you, isn’t it, because if all the lights go out you can just get a lot of servants to hold the candles for you.
The Prince, who was talking at the annual conference of The Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment , went on: “I thought, ‘Hang on a moment’. The Enlightenment started over 200 years ago.”
He’s been studying Madeleine Bunting!
It might be time to think again and review it and question whether it is really effective in today’s conditions, faced as we are with huge challenges all over the world. It must be apparent to people deep down that we have to do something about it. We cannot go on like this, just imagining that the principles of the Enlightenment still apply now. I don’t believe they do. But if you challenge people who hold the Enlightenment as the ultimate answer to everything, you do really upset them.
That would be partly because nobody holds that and people who do hold Enlightenment values get very stinking tired of being characterized in that stupid way. Nobody nobody nobody ‘holds the Enlightenment as the ultimate answer to everything’ you ignorant git so why don’t you get it right if you want to say something?
Not to mention of course the absurdity of assuming that just because an idea is 200 years old therefore ‘we have to do something about it’ i.e. get rid of it. The monarchy is a good deal older than that but we don’t hear Chuck saying we have to do something about it, do we!
Instead, the Prince advocated a holistic approach to the world’s problems…“What is the point of all this clever technology if at the end of the day we lose our souls, and the soul of nature of which we are a part?”…The Prince also made an impassioned call for houses to be built so that birds, such as swallows and swifts, could make their nests there.
Holistic approach; souls; birds’ nests. For that he thinks he has to do something about the Enlightenment? I don’t see the necessity, myself.
Of course we must do something about the Enlightenment! All of you rational people are scaring the fairies and pixies away! And that’s not very holistic, now is it?!?!!
The mills of Windsor grind slowly, but the grind exceeding fine… Trouble is, it’s hard to know what the princeling means when he’s come out with it. As evanescent as smoke. Something tells me the he has a Hanover.
Actually, it seems pretty obvious that Charles has been misquoted by a reporter up to no good. I am almost certain that Charles meant to say ‘wholistic’.
Maybe he meant to say Dr Whoistic.
Maybe he meant it as an obscure but heartfelt compliment to Richard Dawkins.
But then again, draping the Georgian bulk of Buck House with nesting boxes and bird feeding stations has a lot going for it. Though Chas would have his work cut out to stop Phil getting up on the roof and blasting away at them with his shotgun.
It has been known that Charles’ family does not comprise the brightest bulbs.
Aw! No one got my joke! I think he had a Hanover! That is, he’s a throwback. That’s what the Windsors were called before they changed their name.
I got it, I got it, I got it! I laughed, too. I just, you know, figure I get tedious if I reply to everything.
I like jokes like that. Julian has one in an interview for the next TPM. It made me laugh. (I’ve been subbing today.)
What an amusing post. And what pathetic content. Chuck is apparently all of the following – dopey, happy, irresponsible, smiley, sleepy, aristocratic, sneezy, doc, insufficiently bashful.
I didn’t completely get the joke but I knew there was one in there if I just knew enough about Hanovers. Good one, Eric!
I like swallows and swifts all the same. They’re more like souls than anything — flitting and evanescent, coming and going mysteriously — except for the minor point that they actually exist.
Oh I love swallows. I always jump and squawk when I see the first one in April. When I was working at the zoo we had swallows nesting in the llama barn, so when the door was supposed to be closed during the day I said we had to fasten it ajar so that the swallows could get in and out. We did, and they did.
One is always interested to hear how modern life can be improved by irrationality or mysticism.
It’s incredibly depressing that there’s enough discursive breathing room about that one can get away with laughing at Enlightenment principles without being universally mocked. Wow.
Eric, if Charles had a Hanover he possibly got it the night before by going out on the town and getting plastered; by which I mean painting the town red. Then for all we know he could have gone on to batten the whole burg.
See what you started?
Of course Charles is against the enlightenment – his title is a holdover from the dark ages.
“Nobody nobody nobody ‘holds the Enlightenment as the ultimate answer to everything’ you ignorant git so why don’t you get it right if you want to say something?”
An absolute gem!
Chucky is the kind of guy who can’t eat prawns for fear of cannibalism.
Of course it’s an abuse of his position too. If he were just a homeopath or clairvoyant, or whatever it is he’d really like to be, you wouldn’t be reading about him.
Remember that he wants to be known as Defender of Faith instead of Defender of the Faith. Just what we need.
He has bats in his belfry.
I think that he says a lot of sensible things. Take a look at this speech:
http://tinyurl.com/m72gzw
Yes, I think he’d drop the Enlightenment issue as it is needlessly diverting and so yes I’d frame the larger philosophical issues differently.
But on the big practical issues of urbanism, sustainability and preservation, he’s quite good and I urge you to read him, critically if you like but fairly.
The Enlightenment led to a bumbling, unpopular king getting his head cut off. This probably has Something At All to do with Charlie’s viewpoint.
David S, maybe he has hit on a few good ideas, but you know what they say about a busted clock. And if you’ve got, say, five dozen staff to wait on you, are you – personally – sustainable? I think Charles exceeded Gaia’s carrying capacity somewhere around the third under-footman.
Since the faiths Charles would like to defend are mostly a great deal older than 200 years, it’s a mite puzzling that he should hold age against the Enlightenment. Still, if my potential head-of-state prefers to be known as the Unenlightened One, who am I to object?
“The Enlightenment led to a bumbling, unpopular king getting his head cut off.”
His name escapes me…
I know Charles is bit buffoonish and irritating but I always feel I have to stick up for him a bit because nobody else will. Whatever he says about the enlightenment and tradition etc, etc, what he does has been almost completely to the good. The Prince’s Trust is a fantastic charity that transforms lives and he has been right about the built environment and will, in the end, I think have a tremendously positive effect on town planning. There, all done now.
Mr Dick could tell you!
(No that’s not an obscurely lewd joke, it’s a reference to Betsy Trotwood’s friend and lodger.)
As soon as I posted that I noticed David Sucher above sticking up for him, so the pose of the lonely dissident looks a bit sillier than usual. Still, the main points stand.
Mine was in reply to dirigible’s – ‘his name escapes me.’
“what he does has been almost completely to the good.”
Really? His selling quack remedies for large sums of money? His general approval of woo and woo-thought? His use of his position to promote “alternative medicine” and other such nonsense?
“Really? His selling quack remedies for large sums of money? His general approval of woo and woo-thought? “
I meant to draw a line between what he said and what he did. I agree that homeopathy is daft but I don’t think there is anything actually wronmg with selling it (so long as it isn’t on the NHS) and Charles uses the money for an important cause.
His philosophising is annoying, but I don’t, really, beleive it has an effect on the world. His actions do and the effect is very positive, much more so than any of mine and massively more so than any other royal I can think of or many other men of his wealth.
The decapitated king I had in mind was Louis XVI, oddly enough. I thought Charles I was more a victim of the Reformation – divine right theory, John Hampden, Covenanters, and all that?
John M, there’s a lot wrong with Charles pushing homeopathy. First up, the royal seal of approval might encourage dim people to give fake medicine to their kids when the kids are genuinely ill. Not good.
Oh, der, of course it was, since the Enlightenment caused the decap. I blame the four hours of sleep.
John, really, you don’t think there’s anything wrong with selling very expensive nothing to gullible people? Not even ethically wrong? I certainly think there is!
If it were just over-priced but still real stuff of some kind – marmalade, socks, writing paper – then at least people know what they’re wasting the money on (a label). But it’s supposed to be medically or nutritionally beneficial in some way. That’s why he got an official rebuke from whatever that body is that gives official rebukes! The label was misleading – they had to change it.
I agree that you should not be allowed to make misleading claims for a quack medicine, but I don’t think there is anything ethically wrong with selling it otherwise. People do seem to want this stuff and so long as they are grown ups. It is only water and it can’t hurt them Is it much worse than selling ‘mineral water’with all its spurious implied health benefits?
That’s not to say that I approve of Charles’ enthusiams for this stuff, just that it is worth balancing the harms from that (which I think are invisible) with the good he does which is very real.
But quack medicine of course is always peddled with misleading claims of some sort – it’s called ‘Detox’ or something. If it’s just sold as ‘some tea’ or ‘juice’ or ‘foot-shaped gauze’ it’s not quack medicine anymore. I don’t think there is anything hugely ethically wrong with selling overpriced marmalade or oatcakes, I suppose, though I don’t think it’s particularly admirable either. But Charles was selling stuff that purported to be more than that, and wasn’t.
Oh come on, if there was an ethical problem with fibbing to sell things, where would we be???
That man really, really, reeeaaally pisses me off. That is all. You all know why: I don’t need to go into details, just to get it off my chest.
Off-topic but I hope you’re going to post about this pair of ugly articles OB:
Hugo Rifkind in The Times and George Pitcher in The Telegraph. So many things wrong I don’t know where to begin, but Rifkind’s astonishing statement, ‘Annoyingly, though, and as my philosophy degree taught me in week one, it’s only Cherie’s lot that make conceptual sense. There’s no such thing as abstract morality. It doesn’t even make any sense. If God isn’t the ultimate answer, what is?’ is probably a jaw-dropping place to start, and makes me wonder exactly what he studied on his Cambridge(no really, according to Wikipedia anyway…) degree course.
Aiyiyi – I will do that, Dave J L. After I get through snickering at Dave’s remark.
Environment-positive policies are good, certainly – but if they are primarily driven by emotive rhetoric, sentimental twaddle and outright woo, the good is undermined precisely because something good and important is associated in the public mind with the worst possible sorts of justifications for public policy. If they are good policies, they can and should be supported by sound justifications – and those sound justifications need to be articulated by capable critical thinkers who actually appeal to reason and evidence, which Chaz demonstrably does NOT. Since bad policies are more likely based on appeals to bad justifications, we should not applaud the rare occasions when bad justifications are used to support good policies. Environmentalism rooted in sentiment-driven, New Age-y nonsense and supported by woolly-minded rhetoric hurts far more than it helps.
“If the swallows and swifts stop coming here and nesting on the buildings that I love, then there is no point to life. Literally. It is symbolic, like the albatross.”
‘Literally’? If they just nested in the cliffs, river banks and caves that they used to before humans provided handy overhangs, then all the purpose in life would disappear? Or is Charles just showing he’s very careless with the English language he claims to love?
Charles’ use of language is deeply silly at times. But if you reject science when talking about environmental issues, as he often does, silliness is bound to be on your rhetorical itinenary.
I wish someone would actually read his talk (or watch it) before people spout off so blithely. Charles is indeed subject to criticism but I don’t think very many of you know what it is.
http://tinyurl.com/m72gzw
But the fact that he said X in the published talk (if it is a fact) doesn’t mean he didn’t say Y in conversation.
Charles is subject to criticism for a great many reasons. Most or all of them are presumably debatable, but that doesn’t automatically mean we’re wrong to criticize him for the reasons we have selected.
I’m not sure, OB. Here is one definitive remark:
“If they are good policies, they can and should be supported by sound justifications – and those sound justifications need to be articulated by capable critical thinkers who actually appeal to reason and evidence, which Chaz demonstrably does NOT.”
G Felis is explicitly stating that PC’s environmental policies are NOT based on “reason and evidence.”
I suggest that G Felis should likewise be based on “reason and evidence” in explaining why PC is so wrong.
I have some significant criticism based on PC but I try to base his explicit language as my starting point.
The irony is of course that PC is very much of the Enlightenment, as he does call to science. I have no idea why he speaks disparagingly about the Enlightenment (and only in part, btw, as he states). In fact I’d suggest (seriously) that he is very much a Modernist in his own way.
No idea? Really? It’s of a piece with his general New Agery, and there’s plenty of that in the speech, mingled with more sober-sounding stuff.
In truth I find the whole thing very presumptuous, because he speaks as if he had standing to pronounce on all this, as if he were a recognized knowledgeable authority on a whole range of subjects, and as if his views obviously had weight. He has delusions of importance and intellectual heft.
OB, are you specifically referring to PC’s Dimbleby speech?
http://tinyurl.com/m72gzw
If so, I really can’t understand what you don’t think is a thoughtful piece of work, even if you find it flawed or disagree with it etc etc. Sure I agree that it would be better from a political perspective (i.e. in terms of effectiveness of important issues) if he avoided the spiritual aspect.
Personally I take my issues where I can agree with people — so long as we agree about practicality I don’t care too much if we disagree on “philosophy.”
Moreover I was specifically asking G Felis to respond.
David, the one you linked to, yes. I didn’t say I didn’t think it was thoughtful – I didn’t give any opinion on whether it was thoughtful or not. For the kind of speech it is I don’t really think ‘thoughtfulness’ is enough. I think PC thinks it is, at least in his case, and I think that’s where he goes wrong (or one place he goes wrong). I don’t really care whether PC is thoughtful or not; the point is more that he’s a self-appointed expert on a whole range of technical subjects, and that there is no reason to think anyone would pay the slightest attention to his thoughts if he were not a royal. Since he does a lot of damage that way with his ‘medical’ advice, I’m not disposed to admire the habit.
But you were specifically asking G Felis to respond, so I’ll stop intruding.
But Charles has lobbied for public money to be spent on useless therapies, he has put his oar in in planning decisions, and look at how Edzard Ernst was treated as a result of PC’s machinations:
http://www.dcscience.net/?p=89#more-89
As has already been said, he spouts off without bothering to inform himself (or maybe he did try to inform himself but couldn’t understand it)!