http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/nov/06/harmony-prince-charles-review
Harmony: A New Way of Looking at Our World by HRH The Prince of Wales
review
Prince Charles is calling for a revolution but is he radical enough,
asks Terry Eagleton
Terry Eagleton The Guardian, Saturday 6 November 2010
Never afraid to stick his ears above the parapet, Prince Charles has
produced a book he proudly describes as a call to revolution. Throwing
moderation to the winds, he comes out in favour of happiness, sustainable
development and cities fit to live in, while opposing greed, ugliness and
environmental catastrophe. Has his old man got wind of this subversive
stuff? Has the prince taken to selling Socialist Worker to the toilers of
Clarence House?
Harmony is a hard book to summarise, since apart from Jedward and Marxist
literary theory there is very little in what Charles describes as being
aware and alive in this extraordinary universe that it leaves out. The
unifying thread, however, is the need to abandon a soulless modernity for
a traditional spirituality.
The book ranges from the mating habits of the albatross to the Sufi
brotherhood, from carpet-weaving in Afghanistan to the mysterious
five-pointed star you get when you superimpose the Earth's orbit on
Mercury's. There is a quotation from the Emerald Tablet of Hermes (that
which is above is as that which is below, and that which is below is as
that which is above), which might just be a coded offer to swap
Highgrove with a council house tenant. We move from reflections on the
grammar and geometry of nature to the magical mountain kingdom of
Bhutan, where, as the book fails to point out, democracy is only
recently known. There is some grudging admiration for the Large Hadron
Collider (will it enable us to re-find our place in nature? ), along
with some unqualified approval of termites, Thomas Aquinas and the garden
the prince has created at Highgrove planted with fig, pomegranate and
olive trees because they are mentioned in the Qur'an. This, one takes
it, is his contribution to the war on terror.
There are, to be sure, limits to Charles's revolutionism. He wants the
kind of change radical enough to do away with polluters and modernist
architects, but not radical enough to do away with himself. Meanwhile, he
is eager to share his thoughts with us on Francis Bacon's Novum Organum,
Ficino's tome on Platonic theology, Marinetti's Futurist manifesto and a
number of other texts he has almost certainly not read. He also offers us
some incisive insights into figures such as Justus von Liebig, David Bohm
and Karlheinz Stockhausen, whom he has very probably not heard of.
This is because, being a royal, he can employ people to do his reading
for him. Two such loyal readers-cum-scribes, Tony Juniper and Ian Skelly,
presumably wrote the hard bits of this book, such as how many power
stations there are in the world, while the prince mixed in a number of
high-minded platitudes reminiscent of a Get Well Soon card.
Like many a coffee-table creation, one of the volume's most alluring
aspects is its smell. But there are also some rather fetching pictures of
the Egyptian goddess Ma'at, the prince sitting on his sofa gazing
benignly at a frog and various astrological diagrams of the cosmos. In
somewhat more dubious taste is a photograph of the twin towers of
Chartres cathedral, which are said to resemble Christ's two fingers held
aloft.
Discovering the same organic patterns everywhere you look is a familiar
symptom of paranoia. In the prince's case, however, it represents an
insight into the fundamental rhythms of the universe. If you press your
face on a large piece of paper on a wall, he tells us, and let your arms
describe natural arcs with a couple of pencils, you would find yourself
creating certain cosmically symbolic circles. He forgets to add that you
would also look a complete prat. Charles, to be sure, has the leisure for
such communings, as others may not.
The point of having an enormous amount of money is not to have to think
about the stuff and thus to be free to turn one's thoughts to more
spiritual matters, like the mystical proportions of the Golden Ratio and
why everyone in the depths of a recession keeps banging on unpoetically
about growth and unemployment. The prince is darkly suspicious of
economic growth which is to say of other people's hunger for
possessions rather than his own.
Old-style Tories like the prince support a system that breeds materialism
and cultural cretinism, then throw up their hands in well-bred horror at
what they have helped to bring into existence. Despite almost certainly
never having heard of him a deficiency that doesn't hold him back here
His Royal Highness should recall Bertolt Brecht's parable about the
troubled king of the east who summoned his wise men and commanded them to
inquire into the source of all the miseries in the world. The wise men
duly investigated, and returned to the king with the answer
