[anon291]

Many kings were strong and admirable. Not sure why you are so down on individual kings even if monarchy is not a great system of governance and prone to tyranny.

Good kings provided protection from the very real threat of foreign barbarians, provided a common legal framework, and eased commerce, and thus human flourishing. Good kings deserve commendation even if monarchy has issues.

Ascribing only vices (chopping heads off) to monarchs is wrong.

To be clear, I am a staunch republican and believe king Charles and other European monarchs need to step down. However you are engaging in revisionism

[watwut]

> Good kings provided protection from the very real threat of foreign barbarians, provided a common legal framework, and eased commerce, and thus human flourishing. Good kings deserve commendation even if monarchy has issues.

Are you having some concrete historical personalities in mind or are you actually just making up imaginary kings who simultaneously created a common legal framework, fought against invaders while not invading others, eased commers and also enhanced "human flourishing"? And did all that while other people in kingdom and surrounding kingdoms were basically unimportant to all that and the king was the center person to all of that?

Cause I am going to argue that whatever benefits and disadvantages of monarchy, your king is imaginary. Despite being powerful, kings were very much limited by what went on around them and what they could not control.

[anon291]

There is no country which matches your requirements for good king. This is not a serious question. Yes there have been many just kings throughout history.

[Atlas667]

You know, I am not a historian. And I'm not gonna talk as if I know anything about how kings were viewed by the people.

But in my mind kings can be "good" in the same way slave owners can be "good". Not that much, if any at all, contextually.

[samdoesnothing]

Why not compare them to their modern equivalents? They seem mostly the same as politicians today, except some actually cared about the people the ruled.

[Atlas667]

Nah, I think the rich are the kings, politicians are their court.

We have a bunch of little kings with a public court that theyre all trying to use for themselves.

IDK you but I think you cant get rich by being a good person. You actively have to ignore others' needs to focus on growth, to use people.

[cyberax]

The only "good kings" are:

1. The ones that are long dead.

2. The ones that have their head chopped off.

3. The ones that don't actually have a lot of power.

> Good kings provided protection from the very real threat of foreign barbarians, provided a common legal framework, and eased commerce, and thus human flourishing. Good kings deserve commendation even if monarchy has issues.

"Good kings" did not "provide protection". The army did. They also did not provide "protection" to everybody, regular peasants usually couldn't care less about their current king.

[card_zero]

Many of the long dead ones did good things. In a manner of speaking there shouldn't have been kings in the past, but we can extend that statement to say that the past should have been modern times, which it couldn't be. Any moral judgment has to take into account what can reasonably be expected. Charlemagne, then, who (at least in his capacity as a cultural focal point) standardized Latin and founded schools and reformed the illegible script into miniscule, was reasonably good, for a king. The Persian, Roman, and Indian emperors, who started postal services, were doing it for espionage and warfare, but as it happens, they were also doing some good.

[cyberax]

> which it couldn't be.

And why? Perhaps a good king could have worked at creating institutions rather than "uniting Europe" or other such nonsense?

If you study history, then you'll notice how preciously few people were focused on making the lives of regular people better. With kings and other nobles, the "good things" also tend to be historical accidents. Something that was typically done to gain more power and influence but accidentally ended up being a positive influence.

Regarding Charlemagne, right in the Wikipedia:

> Charlemagne's reign was one of near-constant warfare, participating in annual campaigns, many led personally.

> Any moral judgment has to take into account what can reasonably be expected.

Then why do we worry about slavery, colonialism, racism, and so on?

[anonymous908213]

> If you study history, then you'll notice how preciously few people were focused on making the lives of regular people better.

If you study modern politics, then you'll notice how preciously few people are focused on making the lives of regular people better. I don't actually believe, if you were to do a deep dive on all of the kings of the past few hundred years and not just the most famous ones, that the ratio would be meaningfully worse. I do suspect fame will negatively correlate with "goodness", since people who do their job quietly are less notable than people who cause a commotion.

[card_zero]

Fair point, it would have been physically possible to suddenly implement the electronic age in the 800s. So it could have been, technically, but this is a lot to expect from people steeped in their times.

I don't know why we worry about historical bad deeds, and seek reparations from people's descendents. If the idea is "I should have been born into better circumstances" - well, the meaning of "should" there is very complicated, in how it relates to blame and justice. More generally, we worry about the past bad deeds by modern standards just to assert what our standards are.

[amanaplanacanal]

Reparations can make sense sometimes. If you can identify the individual descendants who still have the resources stolen from others, returning it to the victim's descendants seems like a good thing. Stolen goods don't lose their stink just because the original thief dies.

A recent example would be art looted by the Nazis being returned to the families it was looted from.

As time passes this becomes more and more difficult, of course.

[cyberax]

Nope. I'm not talking about technical advances.

How about abolishing slavery? A representative government? Right to a fair trial?

> I don't know why we worry about historical bad deeds, and seek reparations from people's descendents.

The idea is that some things are just bad and can't be excused by mere history. It doesn't mean that we should automatically pay reparations, but it DOES mean that pretty much all historical leaders should be considered tainted.

Charlemagne is not a great king that united France and made sure education prospered. He was a warmonger who accidentally ended up improving education. And so on.

[card_zero]

Much the same applies to moral advances, like other ideas they're produced by the zeitgeist rather than "made from whole cloth". So it's a valid defense to say that they didn't know any better. What purpose does considering them tainted serve? They're bad by modern standards, yes, and good by historical standards, and we ourselves are bad by future standards.

So what is this even about, something to do with level of respect? Throwing the statue of Big Charlie into the Seine, maybe, because he belongs to the past when everybody's morality was, in the light of our present wisdom, rotten?

I rather think it's good to praise the most enlightened assholes of the past. Sort of like sticking terrible toddler paintings to the fridge.

Re-reading: you might be questioning how much credit is due to the king himself, and to what extent he's a figurehead. But if the good ideas are due to the culture really, it's still the figurehead who represents the culture, and "the culture" would make a very abstract and confusing statue.

Re-thinking: you might also be saying that any celebration of even a long-dead king might really be jingoism. But then I think it's the jingoism itself that should be done away with, not the celebration.