You cannot guarantee that a nation-state that applies these principles will never be crushed. But you can be certain that such a nation will rise again. [1986
Lecture to the annual conference of the Scottish National Party.
Scottish Contradictions
‘There is a storm coming that shall try your foundation. Scotland must be rid of Scotland before the delivery come’.
James Renwick, on the scaffold in 1668.
I would argue that there remains one, and only one contradiction in Scottish society which is fundamental. This is the old contradiction between self-assertion, and self-distrust.
It would of course be easy to propose many other contradictions. We live in a rich country and yet are poor; we appear to have the means for self-sufficiency, in terms of resources and land, and yet are economically dependent. We consider the further diffusion of political authority, within Scotland as within Britain, as an almost unquestionable good, however we interpret the content of the word ‘devolution’, and yet Scotland is a country regionalised, fragmented and divided by geography and tradition to a degree which I find frightening enough already.
But I believe that many Scottish contradictions can be discussed within the broad self-assertion/self-distrust paradox. Take for example the mystery of a people almost extravagantly devoted to the events of its own past, and at the same time so amazingly indifferent to preserving the monuments of that past. When Glasgow destroys a mediaeval university to build a goods yard, or when Edinburgh University blows its monstrous and still expanding crater of devastation in the midst of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century buildings of the South Side, we would appear to be confronting a society which prefers its past good and dead and even dematerialised into myth. The antiquarianism of Walter Scott, who would certainly have fought against both acts of official vandalism, was none the less of this nature. Scottish history was only safe for the historian or novelist to approach and touch when it was certain that the beast’s limbs, the Cameronian tradition for example, had finally lost the power of movement. Only then could an Old Mortality be written, even-handedly sanctifying the brave men on either side at Bothwell Brig. Live Scottish history was to be feared. People might act upon it, imperilling the stable order of the present. The battlefield must be tastefully landscaped, a place for peaceful self-congratulation without partisanship except that of the most harmless and sentimental kind. Self-assertion, and self-distrust.
Scotland still suffers from cultural pessimism in an acute, though declining degree. This is an expression with German origins, used to denote an apocalyptic belief in the decline and decay of a national substance and a national morality in the face of industrialisation. The Russians adopted it, as they adopted so many nineteenth-century German ideas, but slightly altered its content: the Russian version of cultural pessimism is the notion that various forces – it could be Tsarist oppression, or the decline of religious belief, or even the experience of the Mongol invasions – had decisively demoralised the masses of the people to the point at which they were ‘dark’, a force which if unleashed could produce only chaos and anarchy. The corollary, of course, is that democracy has become impossible, and that such a country can be ruled only by an autocracy or by some limited élite composed of the enlightened. (It is interesting to see such ideas forcefully expressed in the political writings of Amalrik and Solzhenitsyn, the Communist regime playing the part of the demoralising force.)
We do not have our Solzhenitsyn, but we have our cultural pessimists. Take the case of Mr Norman Buchan MP. No man knows better, or loves more the popular culture of the Scottish people. Few have done more to defend and encourage it. And yet the very extent of his knowledge dismays him, understanding how much has been irrevocably lost and destroyed by Scots themselves. More than most people, he is aware of the erosion of Scottish self-confidence, and in consequence he cannot believe that Scottish self-government can be other than the handing-over of society to these destructive forces: petty, phili-stine, and repressive. Only internationalism, in his case socialist internationalism and brotherhood, can make Scotland progress and save it from itself. Such is the sense which Mr Buchan might give to ‘Scotland must be rid of Scotland before the delivery come’.
Before going back to this question of internationalism, I would like to raise another symptom of the contradiction which may be called ‘Dochertyism’. Docherty, an Ayrshire coal miner in the early years of this century, is the central character in William Mcllvanney’s novel of that name. He is a powerful, loyal, indomitable figure. And yet his own son grows up to call him a coward. When it comes down to it, Docherty’s response to his own situation is a moral rather than a political one. ‘They’ can take everything away from a working man, he believes, but a fight can be put up to stay human, to behave decently, to prevent ‘Them’ turning a man and his family into animals. When another son gets a girl into trouble, he throws him out of the house. His politically-minded son, however, dismisses this moral form of last-ditch resistance as worthless, the comforting delusions of the wage-slave.
‘Docherty’ tells us something about the depoliticising, socially disabling effects of hard times. In Scotland, these times are still upon us in reality and in tradition and living memory. Tarn Docherty was free with his fists, where honour was concerned, but never found – in his own times – a way to change the system. Self-assertion and self-distrust appear as consequences of the Industrial Revolution and of economic exploitation. The Euro-Scot report stands as evidence that Scottish generations still continue to grow up feeling degraded, resentful and hopeless, prisoners of our primal contradiction.
Empty Scottish rhetoric of self-assertion would fill a small, sad dictionary. ‘Tartanry’ is familiar enough, and the private touchiness of the wee mon is familiar too. Modern Scottish society is notoriously marked by the lack of a large, confident and politically influential middle class, a lack which made scarce the bourgeois value of tolerance. But did not Labour, which more or less inherited Scotland this century from the Liberals and the Church of Scotland, develop its own rhetoric of self-assertion which became empty too? Socialist internationalism, which once meant something in the days of John Maclean and Willie Gallacher, seems to me often to serve a deliberate avoidance of the issues. Those who resist devolution on the grounds that they are ‘internationalists’ usually turn out to be ‘British patriots’, the most insular and isolationist of all creeds. Politicians who say they want Scottish self-government in order to end a separation from the outside world rather than to commence one, seem to be on harder ground.
I would like to speculate a little more about the extent to which Labour has succeeded, if not replaced, the presbyterian churches as the pervasive authority in Scottish life. The Church of Scotland, based on the small community, was not easily adaptable to the sudden emergence of huge urban proletariats and has often lost touch with the industrial worker. In such areas, the control of preferment and social assistance and even the provision of a world-view has generally passed to the Labour Party and to some extent to the trade unions themselves.
Without minimising the secular scale of this change, the Party none the less inherited much from the Kirk. In particular, the self-assertion/self-distrust contradiction has been carried on.
Both were organisations whose legitimacy was traced back to an original rebellion. Labour arose from the revolt against nineteenth-century laissez-faire capitalism, the presbyterian churches from the revolt against the Papacy and the established ruling groups of those times. Both institutions maintained this rebellious, levelling stance long after they had gained effective control of the societies they arose to emancipate. Inevitably, a degree of false consciousness arose as the original enemy diminished into history. The self-assertion which strikes defiant postures against a departed enemy becomes an empty self-assertion, whether it is Davie Deans ranting against the persecutors of the savoury remnant or a Labour politician blaming the defects of municipal housing on the machinations of fat cats in
the City who want to restore total free enterprise. The problems of eighteenth-century small tenants were not encompassed in the threat of a Stuart restoration, any more than the problems of a miner at Newcraighall are summarised in the possibility that the Earl of Dalkeith wants his pits back. The real enemy was, or is, different.
Twice in Scotland, then, the party of rebellion has become the party of authority. Self-distrust, doubt about the individual’s entidement to realise his own potential through social action, has often been enhanced by both powers. Take, for instance, the sections of the Longer Catechism dealing with the commandment to honour thy father and mother. It is explained that ‘father and mother’ signify authority in general. The catechism details the duties of inferior to superior – and vice versa, because this is not an autocratic social creed: the superior has his obligations too. But social bonds are described exclusively in terms of duties, never in terms of rights.
Much the same attitude has been discerned by Labour’s critics in the party’s approach to local government. The party member or council tenant is expected to fulfil his duties of turning out at election time or paying his rent, but he is not very effectively encouraged to participate between times in the running of his own party or community. He has rights (we should remember, by the way, that the Longer Catechism was composed over a century before the formulation of the concept of the rights of man), but the exercise of those rights is largely performed by elected authority on his behalf.
Scotland never had a great laicising movement, even though it was one of those countries – unlike England – in which the church exercised an influence which sometimes reached theocracy and often approached it. This is unusual in Western Europe, with the Irish exception. Such a laicising, liberal movement in politics has been a condition of the modernisation of such a society in terms of social attitudes. Its absence, as a great source of national and personal confidence, as an educative force, leads famously to queer misperceptions. Poland never had such a movement either (like Scotland, never having experienced the rule of a confident and prosperous native middle class). Just as Polish workers will riot in the belief that the Communist government means to abolish Christmas or exterminate its own people by free contraception, so a Scottish worker will – in some parts of our country – do violence for the contorted superstitions of Orangism.
Our country is very individualist, but not very democratic. Self-distrust has focused on the possibility of self-government, as if national feeling and pride were – in a contradictory manner – private emotions which had no place in the public domain. The Scottish version of history seem to oscillate between extolling the virtues of passive suffering and glorifying moments of volcanic, almost involuntary violence. Where are the episodes in which the Scottish people, by holding together and labouring patiently and wisely, achieved something?
We are beginning to escape from the great contradiction now. But self-government, even independence, cannot normalise Scotland by themselves. They must lead on to a cultural revolution, a society in which the people rebel, easily and goodhum-ouredly, every day of their lives. Then, and not when we are rid of ourselves, will the delivery come.
[1976
Paper for the Church of Scotland Colloquy on Devolution.
Stonehenge and its Power Struggles
It’s startling to meet a revolution in a museum – especially in the National Museum of Antiquities in Edinburgh. But the new exhibition there, ‘Symbols of Power at the Time of Stonehenge,’ is a revolutionary act. It breaks with the old traditions of British archaeology. It nails up a recklessly bold manifesto about the nature of die past. It challenges us to reason about both past and present in a new way.
What is shown is astonishing enough. It is a blaze of ancient gold, of arrogant treasure in metal, stone and pottery gathered not only from Scotland but from all over Britain, from France and Holland and both Germanies. It is rich for the imagination; you sit within the replica of a stone circle from Aberdeenshire, watching dawn and dusk pass over the hills it has guarded for 4,000 years while the crows chatter in the trees, and the spine creeps. You see the building of Stonehenge in computer graphics, or the almost Japanese lightness of a wooden shrine from Bargeroosterveld in Holland. You are on the threshold of sensing how lost peoples connected reverence with power.
But the theory being put forward is more exciting still. David V. Clarke and his colleagues who made the exhibition think they know how inequality began, in the centuries between about 2500 and 1200 B.C. The leaps and assumptions they make have appalled some archaeologists. This is as momentous a rebellion for prehistory as the 1874 Salon des Refuses was for painting.
The theory runs like this. In about 2500 BC, people lived in small farming setdements in a state of primitive equality, worshipping their ancestors in communal tombs containing the bones of generations. Gradually communities linked together into regions. A new sacred leadership could call on enormous reserves of labour to build communal monuments, like Stonehenge itself. This new power élite claimed that it could communicate directly with the gods, no longer through the mediation of the dead ancestors in the tombs.
As time passed, new élites arose to challenge the power of those who controlled the monuments. (Clarke and Co. have no time for old theories about successive invasions to explain cultural changes: they see change as the product of internal social power struggles.) These new groups possessed the secret of metalworking, a hereditary craft which soon transformed the families who possessed it into a dominating class.
The old sacred leaders fought back, heightening their prestige with even richer regalia like jadeite axes and ceremonial stone maces, and huge crescents of beaten Irish gold which they hung round their necks. But they were doomed. By about 1700 BC, the metal workers’ power was triumphant. They took over and adapted some communal monuments, like Stonehenge; others fell into disuse. The new rulers expressed their power and ideology by gorgeous individual burials. The age of collectivism was over; the age of individualism and of class power had begun.
The force of the Edinburgh show is double. First, there is this new account of history, a flag bravely run up which may well be shot full of holes. But the second impact is deeper. Archaeologists are daring to speculate at last, to go beyond mere accounts of what is found to guess about what sort of people and communities produced the finds.
For generations, prehistorians have played safe by sticking to ‘fact,’ to recording and comparing pottery fragments, postholes, arrowheads. Fantasy and generalising were disreputable. Museums became the dull places they mostly remain. No wonder the late Sir Mortimer Wheeler barked: ‘We have been preparing timetables: let us now have some trains!’
Then, some 15 years ago, the ‘New Archaeology’ began to hit this country. It sent trains rattling off in all directions. It demanded that scholars and diggers should have ideas and prejudices. It said that it was nonsense to expect ‘facts’ to ‘speak for themselves’: the archaeologist was merely listening to his own preconceived ideas without admitting it. The American J. R. Platt wrote scathingly: ‘We speak piously of taking measurements and making small studies that will “add another brick to the temple of science”. Most such bricks just lie around the brickyard.’
This approach, born of the new philosophy of structuralism and the older doctrines of Marxism, turned ‘the scientific method’ on its head. A digger no longer opened a burial mound to ‘see what the evidence says.’ He made his hypothesis about its meaning first, then excavated to see if the contents proved him right or wrong.
Archaeology had blown up. And in the confusion, archaeologists darted about looting other disciplines: anthropology, cybernetics, sociology, aesthetics. A frightful jargon rose and mercifully fell again (‘a single multistage cultural assemblage system trajectory!’ exclaimed one zealot over something or other). But the profession was liberated. In the past, archaeologists felt that their science was immature, even inferior to other, older sciences; they feared that if they
pushed out their frontiers beyond their trays of bits and pieces, some academic Jupiter would crush them for presumption. Now, as Edinburgh shows, they have come of age.
‘Symbols of Power’ teaches us that nothing is static, that communities 4,000 years ago lived in a condition of social change and political competition as communities do today. This is the importance of junking the ‘invasion’ idea, which implied that ancient people lived in an unchanging eternity until alien immigrants rushed in to inaugurate a new period of changeless-ness with different equipment. On the contrary, it seems that around Stonehenge there lived conservatives laden with gold and divine knowledge, scheming to defend their influence against local rebels and sceptics – who, in turn, chafed to get rid of the old frauds and run things in a modern way with Beaker pottery and metal tools.
But the exhibition – and the New Archaeology that lies behind it – are also about ways of looking at Britain now. They are a call to look at a city street with its own symbols of power – the BMW, the police uniform, even the girl’s vermilion hair – and to see them as signs of displayed wealth, of state authority, of aspiration, rather than just as ‘facts.’ They suggest that when we buy a newspaper we should examine how it fits in with our ideas about its owner and his ambitions; about its selection of news to suit his interests; we should not let its contents ‘speak’ for themselves.’
When the rulers who controlled the communal monuments ordered those gold crescents, they decorated them with precisely the patterns used on the Beaker pots preferred by their adversaries. This was very ‘English,’ in our own terms. They were trying to stop the rot, to stop history, by disguising the old order with the superficial fashions of the new.
England teems with this sort of thing. The cathedral has a disco in the crypt, the prince affects the language of ‘street credibility.’ Or – a favourite of mine – we have adopted the idiotic term ‘stately home’ for huge buildings which have been centres of power affecting the lives of hundreds or thousands of people, whose function as a ‘home’ has been in comparison trivial.
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