Delphic Maxim 131: Crown your ancestors
I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each of the Delphic Maxims for 15 minutes a day.
131. Crown your ancestors
I’m tripping over the verb again here. The idea of ‘crowning’ ancestors bashes up against my modern sensibilities: firstly, because I am a low-key republican (in the Australian sense, not the hideous American sense — just as I am a liberal in the American sense, not the Australian). Secondly, because we just don’t talk about ‘crowns’ in the same way as the ancients would have.
I suppose the real question is not so much whether the Greeks meant to literally crown your ancestors (dead or alive, actually lay a crown on their head), but what the metaphor ‘to crown’ somebody actually means. The act of coronation is a dignifying one — it is intimately tied up in the idea that monarchs are divine. That’s why clergy are the ones to place the crown on the monarch: it is an act of reification, God himself is the one elevating this person from mere royalty to the status of holy.
Obviously a religious rite like that drifts even further from our modern, secular times. But the metaphor could be useful: we should dignify, respect, even elevate our ancestors. This might take the form of historical awareness and curiosity, or it might involve respect and reverence on particular occasions.
This is a pretty fraught idea in Australia, because our ancestors are a mixed bag. I can’t speak for the First Australians, but their ancestors — who managed to sustain a culture and way of living with the country for upwards of sixty thousand years — most definitely deserve to be reified. But acts of national remembrance for Australians with more recent ancestry are more, dare I say it, problematic.
There’s a difference between the type of reverence and respect that happens within a family tradition versus what happens across a nation. The family tradition is borne out of intimate familial ties — a grandfather or a relative who died in the wars, or a migrant parent who made a new life for their family in Australia. These close and personal traditions are identity-building, they’re an important part of our social fabric and the way it operates at a personal level. They give structure and story to communities.
But those personal narratives are quite different to national narratives, and I think it’s dangerous to ‘crown your ancestors’ as an act of nationalism. At least, it’s dangerous without a bit of critical reflection (let’s not forget that Michel Foucault once argued that while everything may not be bad, everything is dangerous, so our choices need to be careful and informed).
The classic instance of this in Australia is, I think, Anzac Day. I’ll leave Australia Day to one side, because while the date is problematic, it doesn’t really involve much reification (aside from our current Prime Minister’s bizarre and historically-inaccurate obsession with Captain Cook).
Anzac Day is, of course, a day worthy of reverence and regard for the solemnity of the past. The idea that underpins the day is both sorrow at the loss of life and tragedy of war, and it hinges on the history of Australia’s involvement in the world wars of the twentieth century. Australia spends a lot of money on this commemoration, and millions of people turn out each year to dawn services and memorial services. And rightly so — per capita, the two world wars deeply affected Australia: there isn’t a community in the country that didn’t lose someone.
But at the same time, any occasion that crowns our ancestors needs to be read with caution. The risk of reification, with due credit to Karl Marx, is that it can lead to mystification. And mystification is short-hand for lies and deception, or manipulation of people. The memory itself, and the act of remembrance is not a problem. But when that bleeds into prejudice, nationalism, hatred or intolerance — when it misinterprets a history, or elides historical reality as Australia often does — then it becomes a serious problem.
People demand every year that national days like Australia Day and Anzac Day should ‘not be politicised’, but this is a ridiculous demand because there is nothing more political than this kind of historical remembrance. It doesn’t detract from the respect of ancestors, but taking pride in history is meaningless if we aren’t prepared to take on board the shame in history as well.
Our ancestors aren’t divine — if we ‘crown’ them in the sense that we respect and remember our history, then we shouldn’t forget that fact. All the better to learn from the past, so we don’t repeat our mistakes in the future. That’s an act of reverence for our ancestry that is worthwhile.
