The history of how this idea of individual choice came to dominate our moral landscape is complex and interesting. What began as a worthy cry of individual freedom against exploitative elites — the state, the medieval church and so on — greatly exceeded its intended power, eventually becoming a weapon that could bend reality around the will of individual choice. These days, for example, I can be a woman simply if I choose to be one, irrespective of any biological givenness. Philosophically, this means there are no givens that human will cannot and should not be able to overcome. Truth requires a possessive pronoun, making it submissive to individual will: my truth. All that matters is the choosing. There is only one core moral situation and that is when I point to something and say: “I want it”. The paradigmatic setting for moral reflection has shifted from kneeling in the church pew to standing in the shopping aisle.

Capitalism inevitably plays an important part in this story. The soft Left critique is that capitalism is poor at redistribution and poor at cleaning up after itself — that it doesn’t price in its effects on the environment. On the plus side, it has lifted billions out of poverty and has liberated hitherto oppressed individuals from the restrictions of traditional moral values — the power of the “pink pound”, for instance. In this way, capitalism is a kind of solvent against the weight of tradition: the dollars in my pocket free me to be whoever I want to be, whatever I want to be. Dalit billionaire Rajesh Saraiya is no longer untouchable. How can we not cheer such liberation? My wallet says that I don’t have to abide by your values. For “choice first” liberals, this is all to be counted on the positive side of the register.

We could call this the “Montecito perspective”, but Marx explained it best: “All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.” The Netflix Queen, luxuriating in her ghastly Californian mansion, is a surprising example of precisely what Marx described — her exaggerated bow to the monarch making a mockery of the respect that such a gesture is designed to articulate.

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This is why the “Montecito perspective” contrasts so directly with the “Buckingham Palace perspective”, which is what makes the whole Harry/William drama so much more than a mimetic rivalry between siblings. They are archetypes of two fundamental and bitter political adversaries: very roughly, tradition and the ethics of the market, old world power and new world power, England and America. People will keep on making programmes about Harry and Meghan not because they are intrinsically worth watching, nor because they provide us with any new information about their perfectly ordinary romance, but rather because they reference a very primitive kind of disagreement about the nature of moral reality. Harry and Meghan are compelling in their own way because they are absolute true believers in the kind of moral vision they propound. In direct contrast, many believe that what they think of as being good is the very thing we now need saving from: an ethics indistinguishable from narcissism. The crack between us reaches down to the very bottom.

From the Palace perspective, we are born into a network of relations to which we are obligated from before we take breath. William would use words like “duty” and “service”, a crucial aspect of which is the belief that my life is not all-about-me. It’s not about my will or my having chosen something. Not even about my own personal happiness. I live in the service of something greater than myself. As today’s episodes reveal, while William was somewhere up the M1 opening yet another Community Centre or Homeless Project, Harry was in the departure lounge, giddily breathing into his mobile phone: “We are on the freedom flight.” Little wonder so many of us saw his abdication of responsibility as a betrayal of duty, to both his family and to his country — which, given the nature of the obligations he was born into, amount to the same thing.

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Imagining a happy-ever-after Disneyfied version of royalty, Meghan can be forgiven for not having fully appreciated all of this. Monarchy is not glamour and power; it is bonded servitude — and servitude, as the Queen herself well knew, inspired by a king who divested himself of power to come among us as a baby, one who “emptied himself, taking the form of a servant” (Philippians 2). Harry had the perfect role model to appreciate all this in his grandmother. Unlike his wife, he should have known better. Was that shame on his face as he watched his fairy princess effect an apparently hilarious parody of the bow? If not, it should have been.

“No man can have a right to impose an unchosen obligation on another man,” wrote that patron saint of neoliberalism, Ayn Rand, in The Virtue of Selfishness. This amounts to much the same thing as: “I didn’t ask to be born into this family.” But we all come from somewhere, rooted in a place layered by generations of expectation. And the moral call of such expectations cannot be escaped from simply by relocating to California. There is no psychological tabula rasa to be found, even in the land of reinvention. You take your story with you, and especially so if you are a member of the Royal Family. Harry has not freed himself; he has chosen a very empty form of exile. He has sold his birthright to Netflix, and he has sold it far too cheap. All that Hollywood adulation and California sunshine will not be able to quell the emptiness within.

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Marriage is a legally recognised agreement after all, one that has been shown to confer many benefits for health and wellbeing. Why should I not be able to rent my place as wife and mother in my particular family to others who wish to enjoy some of those benefits?

Ryan Bourne of the Cato Institute recently argued that the technology exists to enable us to trade citizenship rights. Calling the right of British nationals to work in the UK’s high-wage economy “an effective property right we own but can’t currently trade”, he suggests we could ease immigration pressures by implementing an Airbnb-style secondary market in working rights.

If we frame citizenship, or marriage, as something owned by an individual, it is simply a set of bureaucratic permissions. Like the right to live in a house, surely this could be traded in a marketplace? And if the technology exists to create a citizenship market, surely we could do the same for marriage? I could sublet my wifedom and nip off for a weekend on the tiles with the proceeds. Why not?

The problem is obvious — my husband and daughter would, not unreasonably, object. She would no more want her bedtime story read by a stranger than my husband would want to share a bed with that stranger.

My marriage is not a good I own but a relationship, created by mutual consent. In a marriage, I give up some of my autonomy, privacy and private property rights by declaring my commitment to the relationship. What I gain is of immeasurable value: a sphere of belonging, the foundation of my existence as a social creature.

Likewise, citizenship implies relations of belonging, both of me to a community but also a community to me. It also implies commitments on behalf of the community of which I am a citizen. And in exchange it requires commitments of me, as a citizen: to uphold the law, to behave according to its customs and so on. As the late Roger Scruton put it in a 2017 speech:

“The citizen participates in government and does not just submit to it. Although citizens recognise natural law as a moral limit, they accept that they make laws for themselves. They are not just subjects: they appoint the sovereign power and are in a sense parts of that sovereign power, bound to it by a quasi-contract which is also an existential tie. The arrangement is not necessarily democratic, but is rather founded on a relation of mutual accountability.”

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Just as my husband and daughter have a stake in who is entitled to be called “wife” or “Mummy” in our particular context, so other citizens of a nation have a stake in who is entitled to the rights conferred by citizenship.

In this light we can better understand the revulsion that greeted the actions of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex in trademarking “Sussex Royal” for personal commercial gain. Royalty, after all, does not exist in a vacuum. It is not an intrinsic property of a person, like blue eyes or long legs, but something conferred both by the monarchy and also by the subjects of that monarchy.

As Charles I discovered in 1649, ultimately no king can govern save by the consent of his subjects. Royalty is not a private property, but a relationship. The popular disgust and anger engendered by the Sussexes’ move to transfer their stock of royalty from the relational public sphere to that of private property is in truth anger at their privatising something which does not belong to them but to the whole nation.

In The Question Concerning Technology, writes Josh Pauling, Heidegger argues that digital technology uncouples humans from what is real, paving the way for a mindset that treats everything as “standing-reserve”, or in other words “resources to be consumed”. For Heidegger, seeing the world thus is dangerous because it flattens all other perspectives:

Commodifying nature and humanity leads us to discard other understandings of being-in-the-world and the practices, beliefs and ideas that accompany them: all aspects of reality are incorporated into the ordering of standing-reserve.

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The Sussexes’ move to turn their royalty into royalties provokes anger because it flattens something rich in socially created meaning to the simple order of resource: an ore to be mined. It turns something from a relationship to an object, and is — like mining — destructive of what it consumes. For while relationships, being dialogic, can be infinitely renewed, once the goods created in social relationships are claimed as private property by one party in that relationship, they will cease to be renewed.

My husband’s goodwill would rapidly wear thin were I to Airbnb my role in our family. Similarly, Bourne’s citizenship marketplace fails to consider how the general population would react to seeing fellow citizens renting their right to work to non-citizens and swanning about spending the unearned proceeds. And the goodwill enjoyed by the Duke and Duchess of Sussex while discharging their royal duties has already evaporated, now it transpires they wish to enjoy the privileges of their elevated station without embracing its obligations.

Treated as objects to be exploited, relational meanings wither and die. Treated as dynamic relationships, they are infinitely renewable. In this sense, they are more akin to ecologies in the natural world. In Expecting the Earth, Wendy Wheeler argues that in fact ecologies are systems of meaning: whether at the level of DNA or megafauna, she says, living things deal not in information but in meanings that change dynamically depending on context.

Why does any of this matter? “Modernity is a surprisingly simple deal,”  writes Yuval Noah Harari in Homo Deus. “The entire contract can be summarised in a single phrase: humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power.” The impressive achievements of modernity might make the loss of meaning seem, to some, a fair exchange.

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But if Wheeler is right, meaning is more than an optional seasoning on the mechanistic business of living. In Man’s Search for Meaning, Victor Frankl observes of his time in Nazi concentration camps that those who felt they had a goal or purpose were also those most likely to survive.

Indeed, the growing phenomenon of “deaths of despair” is driven, some argue, by deterioration in community bonds, good-quality jobs, dignity and social connection — in a word, the relational goods that confer meaning and purpose on life. As Frankl observed, humans need meaning as much as we need air, food and water: “Woe to him who saw no more sense in his life, no aim, no purpose, and therefore no point in carrying on. He was soon lost.”

An order of commerce that treats relational ecologies as objects that can be exploited will exhaust those objects. That is, in the course of its commercial activities it actively destroys one of the basic preconditions for human flourishing: meaning.

The Estonian thinker Ivar Puura has called the destruction of meaning “semiocide”. As concern mounts about the effects of pollution and emissions on the earth, campaigners have called for new laws to criminalise the destruction of ecologies, which they call “ecocide”. Perhaps we should take semiocide more seriously as well.