... which all leads to a question: does monarchy *depend* on God or gods for legitimacy? Is there any way to justify a hereditary dynasty of rulers that doesn't involve God bestowing authority on the individual at the top of the family tree?
I live in the UK, but I'm definitely not a fan of monarchy. That said, I thought I'd share something I heard recently about this.
At some point in history, people being born to rule could well have made sense. For a long time, you tended to see skills passed from parent to child. It was perhaps an easy way of filling a needed role in a community. Therefore, a blacksmith would teach his sons to be blacksmiths, a farmer would teach his sons to be farmers and so on. In theory, this could also apply to rulers. The current ruler is the one with experience of ruling and is in an ideal position to pass that knowledge onto their children. So that's a potentially pragmatic reason to have a monarchy without the need for gods.
On the flip side, this explanation has a fair few problems with it. Firstly, it assumes that children are always going to be able to learn their parent's trade and will always be suitable for the job. Any look through history should reveal that there have been monarchs who were just plain
bad. Pragmatism falls down there, since the sensible thing to do would be to find somebody else to rule.
Secondly, it's too simplistic when applied to entire countries. It could arguably work for small, self-sufficient communities, but an entire country is a different matter. Monarchs required advisors and courtiers aplenty, who's to say that one of them didn't learn more about ruling than the monarch's children?
Finally, the explanation relies on the good old line "at some point in history." Today brings its own problems, which I don't think monarchy is suitable to deal with. In fact, I'd say the pseudo-monarchy of politicians generally being born to wealthy and influential families isn't suitable.
Ultimately, belief in divine right certainly helps to cement a monarchy. The other reasons I see people use to justify the UK's monarchy are that it's traditional and that it attracts a lot of tourism. Keeping something for the sake of tradition strikes me as fairly similar to belief in divine right. Tradition for its own sake needs no reason and to question it is seen as impolite at best. In other words it's something that's collectively considered sacred.
Tourism is a sticky area. Whether or not monarchy is justified depends on whether it generates more income than it costs (let's leave aside the issue of their powers for now). The problem is, how much tourism the monarchy is responsible for generating is all but impossible to determine. How many visitors to the UK just wouldn't bother if we no longer had a monarchy? Personally, I'd be surprised if losing those people ended up costing us more than it costs to keep the monarchy.
OK, ended up ranting a bit more than I expected there. Sorry about that
Hopefully there's at least some food for thought in there.
