The communal joy was irrational – but the things that bind us together always are
There are probably at least a dozen ways to have a pop at the big event – but I am not even going to try. For sometimes, just sometimes, it's worth giving in to a communal sense of joy even when it can't quite be justified by our critical faculties or political commitments.
I put up the bunting, festooned the house with balloons, invited a random collection of friends for champagne and Battenberg cake. I suppose there was a certain irony at the beginning. And all with the excuse that I was doing it all for the kids. But neither was really true. I just loved it. The dress, the service, the procession, the sermon, the uniforms, the two people in love. I even felt the slightest tear. Is this sort of sentimentality really the worst crime in the cultural handbook?
I don't want to pick it all apart, I want to join in, to be a part of the crowd and the cheers. Yes, and God save the Queen. Out on the street there was a palpable sense of togetherness – the normal rules that keep us within our individual bubbles having been temporarily suspended. People were wearing wedding dresses on the London underground. Odder still, strangers were talking to each other.
If there is a weakness of the contemporary left it is that it too often fails to appreciate the power of this collective unconscious: of story and history and ritual and, yes, religion too. It has adopted such a rationalistic conception of reason that it still has not freed itself from the assumption that all will be well only when all cultural forces have been broken down to their basic parts and then reassembled according to some grand rational plan.
This means that things like royal weddings don't find a significant role in the progressive vision of society – and this is a permanent weakness of leftwing politics. For in truth, the things that bind us together often cannot find a deeper rational justification.
The night before I got married, I was challenged by my brother to list the reasons for and against. We went for a curry and on the back of a napkin I tried to make a rational analysis, reasons for on one side, against on the other (Darwin, I later discovered, did something much the same).
But it was a stupid exercise, because no equation of reasons could even begin to describe the situation. How is love to be reduced to a series of propositions? In truth, what binds people together – as a couple or as a society – always exceeds the reach of a purely rational analysis.
This is something the Tories have largely understood. They have long subscribed to the philosophy that it doesn't matter if something fails in theory as long as it works in practice. Thus they remain entirely unbothered by the lack of a coherent philosophical justification of how the state and the church and the monarchy currently relate to each other.
Conservatives intuitively appreciate that the relationship between these institutions tells a story about who we are as a nation that places our existence on a broader canvas than mere citizenship ever could. They make us a part of something bigger, they offer an emotional stake in public life and they give us something in common above the struggle of self-interest.
One of our wedding party guests is a GP in Stockwell. And a republican to boot. Earlier in the week a Kosovan woman came to see him with her children, all waving union flags. "It's the wedding," she explained, "they are so happy." Some readers will now be reaching for their sick bag. But unless the left genuinely makes its peace with all of this, it will continue to struggle for popular appeal.
Dr Giles Fraser is canon chancellor of St Paul's Cathedral