John Donne joins The Queue

18 September 2022

No man is an Iland, intire of itselfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Manor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.

John Donne, Meditation XVII, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions

Most British people who have attended more than half-a-a dozen funerals know this great piece of baroque purple prose. But is it true? Common sense says not. In 2020, 689,629 deaths were registered in the United Kingdom, in Spain 493,776, in Australia 161,300. None of us knew more than a handful of these people and their families. So how were we diminished by their passing?

“Because I am involved in mankind”, said Donne. He was right about the fact. On average, we are only seven steps of acquaintance away from any other person on Earth. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/aug/03/internet.email The number of acquaintances we have is less well established. “British anthropologist Robin Dunbar […] found a correlation between primate brain size and average social group size. By using the average human brain size and extrapolating from the results of primates, he proposed that humans can comfortably maintain 150 stable relationships.” (Wikipedia). Other researchers found that average Americans have about 600 acquaintances, which looks plausible. It’s a few hundred for almost all of us. This circle forms, again for most of us, the outer limit of the people we care about and will pay a price to help. The six steps work because our small circles only overlap in part.

Another chain is created by economic life. Our phones were assembled by young women in China or another developing country. They are driven by chips made by skilled technicians in Taiwan, to designs by engineers in California and Fenland Cambridge. And so on and on. Anything you buy involves the whole world economy. This isn’t new. The Russian economist Wassily Leontief invented input-output analysis in the 1940s to quantify these dependencies and make them operational with matrix algebra. When you think about it, one of the inputs into steelmaking is insurance – and Leontief tells you how much. In this case, our interaction with the other people involved is impersonal apart from the final purchase, and mediated by contract and money: alienated in Marxist jargon.

Can we ever get back to feeling this interdependence, as opposed to knowing about it as a dim abstraction? This is where the famous, such as Queen Elizabeth, come in. They are known as individuals, not to hundreds, or even thousands, but to tens or hundreds of millions. The relationship to their mass acquaintances is completely asymmetrical, and essentially one-way. The messages they broadcast – the term comes from pre-modern agriculture, in which farmers seed fields by hand - generally have a very small effect on each individual, but as this is magnified by their vast audience, their overall impact on society can be large.

The famous are not moral exemplars as a class. Some are actually evil. Many are only famous in a narrow professional role, say as athletes or musicians. I suppose there are people interested in Rafael Nadal’s personal life, but they are a small minority of those who follow him as a great tennis player.

The late Queen Elizabeth was exceptional here. By her office, her concerns extended to every aspect of the polities of the UK and the Commonwealth. The way she carried it out was one of virtue both ordinary and exceptional. Ordinary, in that she was spared the tragic challenges that sometimes produce heroic courage: poverty, persecution, sickness, neglect, cruelty. Nor did she have the exceptional talents in art, science, or sports that enable extraordinary achievement at the risk of personal disaster. Instead her virtues were those quite commonly found in ordinary people: conscientiousness, fortitude, courtesy, humour, dignity, kindness, equanimity. We can even find some of these in ourselves on a good day. Her good days were very nearly 100%, over seven decades (and she was good as a princess before).

It’s hard to fault the quality of the messages she sent us over these long years, which resonated with the self-perception of many British people. Not always: after Diana’s death, her traditional stiff upper lip fell out of sync with the wave of ostentatious grief in the public. Perhaps she would have been wryly amused by the great binge of sentimentality the country – indeed much of the world - is currently living through, with nonstop TV coverage and pensioners risking pneumonia to join the Great Queue for 24 hours.

Now here’s the connection to Donne’s assertion. We did not know Elizabeth as a person, but we did know and like her as a Queen. Her life was a distant part of ours, and her death “diminishes” us in truth. Our strange relationship to her and other celebrities may help us to imagine our similarly distant but real connection to the banana grower in Costa Rica and the Bangladeshi factory worker, and think a bit about what our shared present and future means for the way we live.