The Prince and the Pope

Pope Benedict XVI is the head of the global Catholic Church. As the heir to the British Throne, Prince Charles’ full title will include his status as “defender of the faith”, reflecting his position as the supreme governor of the Church of England. So when it comes to religion, these two are born antagonists. But when it comes to the travesty that is the modern world, they are in full agreement.

Charles’s views are increasingly well-known. He calls modernity a “curse” that “divides us from nature”. The combination of technology and the search for profit alienates us from the world, and what we need to do is restore our lost “balance” and learn “the grammar of harmony”. He’s been rattling on like this for a few years now, and has collected his musings on the subject in a new book called, naturally enough, Harmony. The book has achieved a certain amount of notoriety in the British media, mainly for its slum-tourism suggestions that the Mumbai shantytown that was the setting for the film "Slumdog Millionaire" is a role model for sustainable living in Western cities.

Meanwhile, the Pope last week gave a speech at a world congress of Catholic media in which he did his best Baudrillard impression. He warned of our increasing reliance on “images” and the development of new communications technology: "New technologies and the progress they bring can make it impossible to distinguish truth from illusion and can lead to confusion between reality and virtual reality," he said.

Maybe the Pope has trouble telling truth from illusion – that would be a natural consequence of spending years pretending that huge tranches of the priesthood had got into the biz for the express purpose of abusing the boyish elements of the flock. If you don’t acknowledge it, did it even happen? Maybe we should ask a postmodernist.

To the broader point: the distinction between “real” and “illusory” only maps helpfully onto the distinction between “old media” and “new media” if you make a large number of very tenuous assumptions, most of which only hold if you load the moral dice in favour of the past. And that is certainly something that both the Pope and the Prince have a vested interest in doing.

But what I find most fascinating about both of these characters is that they are both supposedly defenders of two of the oldest and most established religions on Earth. To that end, they are offering the exact remedy for what people are missing most in the modern world, viz., a spiritual dimension. But what is odd is that neither seems to have much faith in their own product; instead, they are bent on pandering to the worst tendencies of the modern mind – the search for meaning in the false comforts of the “authentic”.