In the UK at least, there is, right now, really only one piece of news doing the rounds, which is the arrest of the former Prince Andrew, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. It set me thinking about why this is such momentous news.
In a way, that’s obvious. The fallout from the Epstein files has been building and the need for justice, particularly for those who were so horribly and adversely affected by all that. But there’s a subtler point.
You might say that today, a privileged person has met the full force of the law. I put it that way deliberately, because this notion of privilege and this notion of what a person is, and this notion of what the law is, have a deep history. They’ve evolved over time.
I think that somewhere in the collective unconscious, there’s an awareness in the drama of this moment of how these things resonate over history.
To give a little taster: the notion of privilege, for example, is actually a relatively recent idea across human history. It emerges in the 12th century as “privilege” comes from two Latin words, meaning private and law. And so the privileged person was someone who had a private law, not the general law that governed everyone else.
Of course, the arrest of Andrew shows that privilege doesn’t involve being above the law, quite the opposite. So there’s a dramatic shift there, and this resonance of the word privilege, which has currency in modern times, is echoing that alteration in how human beings understand themselves. And you get to an even deeper sense, I think, of the momentousness of the moment. When you think about the word “person”, as in a privileged person meeting the full force of the law.
“Person”, too, is a word that has a deep history. You may well know that it comes from, probably, a Greek word, prosopon, maybe Etruscan, which meant actually a mask. You put a mask on your face when you went onto the stage, for example, to play a character or god, hence the reference to the mask. And then, in the Roman period, it shifted a bit and it became the personal rights or duties that the individual had, often because of their status, most obviously whether they were free or a slave. So that is still a long way from what we mean by a person now. A really crucial shift was a theological turn, in the Christian period, when the word “person” from the Roman was used to identify the Three Persons of the Trinity in the Christian conception of God. Person, here, distinguishes the different qualities of this three-in-one notion of the divine.
That sets up the value of personhood today, through the notion of the image of God. We human beings are made in the image of God, with the word “person” applied to human beings as such expressing that in the 13th century – again, quite recently. But there it is: the notion of the individual or a human person.
That said, it wasn’t settled down at that point. Conflicts in the modern period put it to the test and, again. The most obvious case to point to is in the American Civil War in the 19th century, when there was the question of whether property can be a person: i.e. can slaves be called a “person” in the legal sense? That tension was one of the deep, dark legal aspects that precipitated the American Civil War in the 19th century. So, when the American Constitution says, we hold these truths to be self-evident, it’s not at all. These things are hard-won and emerge over long periods of time. Momentous shifts of consciousness have to occur for the meaning of the words to take root.
Hence, I think, there is an echo of that in the arrest if Andrew. In the modern world now a person means a human, an individual, a legal entity. So that’s what’s been stress-tested today but our notion of a person has past the test. Amidst everything else that’s going on with the arrest, there’s the arrest of a person with privilege – unimaginable until relatively recently, as the etymological excursus reveals. Matters of great human significance are activated by this event, which is partly why it will be talked about for a long time to come.
There’s no privilege now, in the old sense of legal exception. The notion of the person meaning everybody is strong. It’s not a mask, it’s not about the difference between slave and free, and the connection with the divine has slipped covered the horizon for many. It’s about us all. So, in a way, you can say that today is good. Of course, mostly for the victims of the Epstein horrors, but for subtler reasons. Something of the modern consciousness of ourselves has been found to be robust.
That said, these things never stand still. Privilege has come to mean the privileges of being human in a society, such as having the vote, the right to habeas corpus. But note that last privilege – now being challenged. Privilege and person will shift again, in time.