Word: modern
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...idea persisted to the threshold of modern times that the monarch was a divine personage with magic powers, including the gift of healing by touch. Belief in the king's divine curative powers vanished as surely as belief in the king's divine right to rule-at least in the West. Today's monarchs can be roughly divided into three types: Europe's chairman-of-the-board king, who presides over his country but is not its chief executive officer; the tribal king of Africa and the Middle East, who most of the time still really...
...amount of real power wielded by modern monarchs ranges from zero in Europe to the Old Testament authority which Emperor Haile Selassie, the seemingly indestructible Lion of Judah, still exercises in Ethiopia. Royal trappings run the same range-from the furled umbrella that Denmark's King Frederik carries to go shopping, to the nine-tiered umbrella throne of King Bhumibol of Thailand. The champagne-and-chorus-girl monarch is gone or going; uncrowned dictators or oil millionaires are much freer to be glamorous wastrels these days than are kings...
...unifying tradition-plus something to talk about. In Thailand, it is immensely important. King Bhumibol Adulyadej seems all but divine to his Buddhist masses-an impression enhanced by the tradition that people must approach him crawling along the floor on hands and knees. But he is really a modern monarch, using the ancient ways and rituals to carry his country forward. Theoretically he is a figurehead, limited to ceremonial functions. Beneath the surface he keeps up a mosaic of relationships that make him the most influential man in the kingdom; no governmental change could succeed without his legitimizing...
Pomp and circumstance has its place, and monarchy has the advantage of separating the pomp from the power. This is an enormous timesaver for the government, whose machinery can tick quietly behind the pageantry, processions and boredom of state visits. Besides, the separation is a safeguard against political demagoguery. Modern monarchy often seems to reduce the tensions to which democracy is prone. According to Sociologists Edward Shils and Michael Young in the Sociological Review, it provides an effective segregation of love and hatred. "When the love is directed toward a genuinely love-worthy object, it reduces the intensity...
...true in autocratic kingdoms, but it is scarcely so under constitutional monarchy. According to a widespread psychiatric view, constitutional monarchs represent parents who are always reassuringly present without, however, curbing a people's freedom. They thus embody the continuity and unity that is lacking in so much of modern life. Shorn now of the military ambitions and political self-seeking that made so many of them the scourge of the world, they seem to be reverting to their ancient magical role...