National Traits??

If you really want to upset the “politically correct” mob, bring up the subject of political culture and show that you actually believe that each nation has distinctive cultural traits. It’s become a forbidden subject in such company - which is strange given how far back the concept goes. Because I’ve lived and worked these past 30 years in ten different countries (with 8 years in different parts of Central Asia) I’ve become fascinated by two fundamental questions –

·       Do people in different countries have distinctive and predictable patterns of behaviour?

·       Are the “path-dependent” theorists correct in suggesting that history makes it very difficult for such patterns of behaviour to change? 

We live in a globalised age in which social values have been shifting and becoming more homogeneous and yet the past couple of decades have seen the resurgence of nationalism. Indeed each nation now seems to be divided into two tribes – the “somewheres” and the “anywheres” – depending on the freedom people felt they had to select the professions and locations of their choice.

Last year I did a series of posts on the variety of confusing terms which have cropped up in recent decades which suggest that most of us can be classified into a small number of ways of understanding the world. Some of these are descriptive – simply statements of fact. Others are prescriptive and ideological – ways in which we both understand and act. I’ve selected 5 terms – political culture, national culture, world values and cultural theory. I hope readers find the table useful…. 

Term used	Meaning	Trajectory	Typical referents
“Political Culture”	A term used by political scientists which can be traced to de Tocqueville but whose modern origin is generally attributed to the 1950s and “The Civic Culture” by Gabriel Almond The best intellectual history of the whole debate is Political Culture, political science and identity politics – an uneasy alliance; Howard Wiarda (2014) which looks back over a century of interdisciplinary argument	In the 1940s and 1950s “culture” figured in the work of many American scholars as they tried to understand the challenge of modernisation faced by many societies but was then supplanted by the “rationality” of the economists   with  Culture Matters – how culture shapes social progress (2000) being a seminal work, criticised for really meaning “Western Culture matters”	Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Edward Banfield, Gabriel Almond, SM Lipset  Lawrence Harrison Samuel Huntington  Howard Wiala  Brendan McSweeney is th arch critic of the school
“National Culture”	An indeterminate term	social psychologist Geert Hofstede started work in the 1960s with IBM on cultural differences – taken up by Frans Trompenaars It also figured in the discussions about “transitology” in the 1990s	Geert Hofstede   Frans Trompenaars
“World values”	Clusters of VALUES eg “traditional”, “modern” and “postmodern” used by technocrats to classify societies   Cultural Evolution – people’s motivations are changing, and reshaping the world ; Ronald Inglehart (2018) this article summarise that work.	This stream of work began in 1981 and resurrected the debate on political culture eg The renaissance of political culture Ronald Inglehart (1988) A World of Three Cultures – honour, achievement and joy; M Basanez (2016) a beautifully-written book by a Mexican academic which seems to have exactly the outsider’s take on the subject I need. And one of the early chapters is a literature review – which has no mention of Wiarda !	political scientists and psychologists particularly Ronald Inglehart
“World views”	collection of quasi- philosophical/religious BELIEFS which seem to give us our respective identities	Series of notes on the subject a very useful overview in 12 pages an excerpt from “World Views – from fragmentation to integration” book. the full book here	Kant Wittgenstein   Jeremy Lent
“Cultural theory”	Otherwise known as “grid-group” theory which suggests that mots of us can be classified into 4-5 worldviews	Anthropologist Mary Douglas first developed the “grid-group” approach in the 1970s which was then taken up by policy analyst Wildavsky and political scientist Thompson	Mary Douglas Aaron Wildavsky Michael Thompson

The Truth about privatisation

I get so fed up with the propaganda we are constantly being fed about the need for yet more privatisation of this or that part of our public services. The reality is that privatisation has, with a very few exceptions, been an utter and total disaster. And why would we expect it to be any different?

These are, after all, generally “natural monopolies” and privatisation is achieved by “pretend competition” strongly regulated by the state which rides in to rescue the private companies when they fail. So we get the worst of all possible worlds –

·       hugely inflated prices for the consumer,

·       huge salaries for the executives,

·       additional costs of the new regulatory systems,

·       the profits to shareholders and

·       the additional tax on all of us as the companies collapse, one by one. 

During the past decade, a significant movement has been the return of privatised public facilities to municipal and national governments. You don’t hear much about this – but the TNI produced a useful paper on this in 2019 called The Future is Public. It contains lots of examples.

And today is the final day of what looks to have been an important 3 day Conference on global Public Services which considered this useful report on Shifting Narratives on Public Services whose tables map the very different narratives used variously by global bodies (including private companies), national and local governments and social movements in the last 2 decades in the fightback against privatisation of public services

The paper also assesses what we can do to get more effective stories which can help dismantle the make-believe world the marketing lobbies have created

Update; early August, UK public opinion is now really building about the unbelievable spikes in prices particularly in energy and food. Emergency payment now the subject of discussions everywhere. New campaigns catching the public imagination eg https://wesayenough.co.uk/; https://dontpay.uk/pledge/meter/; https://twitter.com/We_OwnIt; https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/aug/06/gordon-brown-set-emergency-budget-or-risk-a-winter-of-dire-poverty; https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/aug/07/britain-social-emergency-leaders-political-vacuum 

Managers take all

More than 60 years after I first started studying economics, I still find myself utterly confused about a subject I actually taught for a few years in 1968 until I realised my mistake. From time to time, posts share my confusion in the blog which has followed with interest the various attempts made in the new millennium to bring what is nothing else than a religious/metaphysical doctrine – kicking and screaming – into the modern world. Economics is abstract and boring for a reason – Economists simply don’t want you to know their dirty little secret; that it’s all constructed on sand…on a pile of debt (for which read, equally appropriately, another 4 letter word beginning with Sh) 

The proud Scottish tradition of Political Economy had been killed off only a few years after I left the University of Glasgow (proud home of Adam Smith) – to be replaced by the much more technocratic-sounding “Economic Science” which quickly threw over its flirtation with Keynesiasm and succumbed first to monetarism and then scientism. If only they had persevered with political economy, they would now belong to the new Brave Hearts who have recently hoisted once again the flag of Political Economy (such as Mark Blyth, Wolfgang Streeck, Yanis Varoufakis, Richard Wolff and Michael Hudson).

Such writers expose the fallacy of those who persevere with the nonsense that “the Market” gives us what Voltaire’s Candide more than 250 years ago satirically described the “best of all possible worlds”. Such writers like to set up 2 strawmen - “the market” and “the state” - with the former requiring a set of “heroic” assumptions such as “perfect competition” dependent on consumers having “perfect knowledge” and companies having free access to markets. In the real world, such conditions hardly ever exist. 

One thing which economists try to ignore is “power” – one of the main elements of the separate discipline of Political Economy. The can’t therefore fit “Monopolies” and “oligopolies” into their schema – which is a bit awkward as they are the basic reality in our globalised world – with innovative small companies increasingly swallowed up by multinationals owing allegiance only to shareholders of conglomerate Investment Funds interested only in short-term profit. The European Union still takes competition seriously – that was the point of its “Single Market” programme which was pushed so strongly (ironically by an acolyte of Margaret Thatcher). But, thanks to Bill Clinton and the Democrats, the United States stopped taking competition seriously some 30 years ago 

All this is by way of a preamble to an important book I’ve been reading these last couple of days - Winners Take All – the elite charade of changing the world by Anand Giridharadas (2018) and starts with a Leo Tolstoy quote which is a favourite of mine 

I sit on a man’s back choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am sorry for him and wish to lighten his load by all means possible…except by getting off his back.

and goes on to argue that –

·       The image of the “market” is so powerful it has shaped our expectations of the state

·       The public sector now likes to pretend that it has “quasi-markets” which set bodies with public funding up against one another in mock competition

·       “Thought-leaders” receive great rewards from corporate leaders who want to hear positive stories of what can be done – not be cast down by the difficulties and problems presented by critical intellectuals

·       The tech sector now offers the promise of being able to solve problems which were previously seen as too difficult or impossible

·       Private companies are invited by the state to become involved in “Partnerships” which generally involve them pocketing profits and the state the sizeable losses

·       Global health and educational problems are increasingly the focus of significant philanthropic funding eg the Clinton Global Initiative

·       The key actors in such work are the managers of International Consultancies such as McKinsey

·       Who are looked to by both the public and private sector as saviours – with their “protocols” and smart advice

·       It was to McKinsey that Obama turned when he wanted to explore the future of democracy 

The book is a very easy read – from a journalist well-versed, I sensed, in the social sciences since he profiled very appropriately some of the books used for his argument eg “The Ideas Industry” by Daniel Drezler. And I liked the way he brought individuals in to illustrate the story – in the opening pages a young woman vacillating between the private or public sectors who chose McKinsey; in the middle a music student who went to live in Mongolia for 5 years, joined McKinsey and ultimately helped Soros set up his new Social Investment Fund; in the chapter on Philanthropy an older guy who dared to call out the hypocrisy of the rich; and, finally, Bill Clinton. 

When I think about change-agents, I’ve often wondered how we can distinguish the real deal from the fakes. But how do we ever know what’s in our hearts – and how we might change? Both the book’s sub-title and argument certainly made me think very seriously about this. As a middle-of-the-road sceptic and “mugwump”, I am myself at least potentially guilty of such charades. Also appropriately, the book includes this famous quotation from Lampedusa’s “The Leopard” which people often get wrong 

 “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change” (Falconeri)

Useful Reading

-       A thoughtful review from one of the book’s targets

-       and it seems to have hit home at the famous Wharton School of Management

-       this review briefly summarises each chapter and gives a good sense of the book

-       blog reviews are quite rare but can be quite deep – and this is a good example

-       The McKinsey Way; Ethan M Rasiel (1999) shows the nature of the beast

-       The McKinsey Mind; EM Rasiel and PN Friga (2002) reveals the dirty secrets

-       The LSE Book Review was very positive

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/14/winners-take-all-by-anand-giridharadas-review

Scottish to the Bone?

Something seems to be stopping me from delivering on my promise to reveal the essence of the Scottish soul. Perhaps the sheer impossibility of the task? I know the country too well to be comfortable with cultural generalisations. We like, for example, to think of ourselves as egalitarian and, on Burns’ Night, wallow in sentiment and whisky about our values.  But I grew up in a shipbuilding town deeply riven with class (and religious) divisions – which undermined the myths the country tried to sell…

·       The professional classes lived in the West End and attended the fee-paying school there.

·       The working class lived next to the shipyards to the east of the town and went to the state schools. 

It’s true that the Calvinist reformation brought educational opportunities to Scottish people noticed even by English visitors - 

schools paid for by the Church of Scotland and local landowners were established in all rural parishes and burghs by an Act of Parliament in 1696. These educational ssocial status. The democratic nature of the Scottish system so impressed the 18th century writer Daniel Defoe that he remarked that while England was a land 'full of ignorance', in Scotland the 'poorest people have their children taught and instructed'. The openness of the Scottish system ran all the way from the schoolroom to the university. A talented working class boy the 'lad o'pairts' through intelligence and hard work and by utilising a generous system of bursaries was able to gain a university education, something largely unthinkable in England in the 18th century.   

and the Scottish Enlightenment seemed to supply the proof of the benefits of that system – although, arguably, it’s been downhill since then with historians tracing the misery into which the working class sank until the Labour Government of 1924 began to offer some hope – particularly with John Wheatley’s historic Bill on Social Housing which started a process confirmed by Atlee’s pioneering government of 1945-51. TC Smout’s “A century of the Scottish people 1730-1850” catches the change well    

Economic historians see a ‘triumphal progression’ from the success of textiles in the first phase of industrialisation through that of iron and coal in the second, followed by a surge in ‘steel, ships, jute, tweed and high farming’ which crashed dismally with the post-1920 depression. But the social historian notices that life in the heydays of success was commonly brutish and that the inter-war years show a marked improvement for ordinary people in terms of health and housing, real income and recreation. The grandchildren of the ‘vibrant’ Scots who worked for heroic industrial success under Beardmore, or strove for a new world order with Keir Hardie, have settled cannily, Smout’s overview implies, for bread and circuses, alias sliced loaf and East Enders. This he most controversially tends to attribute to what he sees as the malign effects of the Scottish education system – still complacently admired by many of those whom he deems to have been its victims.

 

The general ethos of Scottish education, he argues, was throughout his ‘century’ anti-egalitarian. It aimed ‘firstly at providing, as cheaply as possible, the bulk of the population with the bare minimum of education combined with adequate social discipline, and secondly, at giving a small number of children of all classes, but especially of the higher classes, a more respectable academic education, to qualify them for their role as a controlling élite.’ Following the Education Act of 1872, old burgh schools which had given some kind of general access to learning were either transformed, as in 13 cases, into ‘Higher Class Schools’, fee-paying at first, or made into essentially elementary board schools. Edinburgh’s professional middle class successfully captured for its own purposes the funds of the Merchant Company schools and of the Heriot Trust, which had originally been intended for the unprivileged. As a present-day resident, I can confirm that educational snobbery is uniquely widespread in Edinburgh.

For the mass of the population, education thus came to involve a syllabus restricted to the three R’s, thrashed home with the tawse, instilling what A.S. Neill called ‘a gigantic inferiority complex’. Smout sees this as the key ‘to some of the more depressing aspects of modern Scotland’, where there are ‘too many people who fear what is new, believe the difficult to be impossible, draw back from responsibility, and afford established authority and tradition an exaggerated respect.’ 

The experience of housing tends to be ignored by most historians – one blog which has tried to remedy that is Municipal Dreams whose John Boughton has produced a fascinating recent book Municipal Dreams – the Rise and Fall of Council Housing (2018) which traces a tragic trajectory not only of british housing but of the Labour Party. Scotland was Labour to the core for a century – with a brief exception in the 1950s and now since 2007. When I came to political maturity in the 1960s I was proud to be a Labour councillor – although ashamed of how it was managing its housing and educational responsibilities. 

What exactly happened then? Was it just power going to heads? Or was it the sort of deeper arrogance exposed by James C Scott in “Seeing Like a State” and by David Graeber? However it happened, the transition is brilliantly captured in the television series “Our Friends from the North” whose 9 episodes started in 1964 and finished thirty years later just before New Labour th 

Some Lighter Moments

What happens when Scots are asked what it’s like to be Scottish

What is a Burns’ Night supper? Apologies for the Covid warning

What is “Scots wha Hae”?? 

And the best insights

·       The most insightful read on Scotland is Independence of the Scottish Mind by Gerry Hassan (2014)

·       Tom Devine is the country’s foremost historian and has a fascinating discussion here which raises the important question of whether the new historiography anticipated or post-dated the political resurgence of recent decades. This article of his gives a good sense of his opus is this one of 300 years of living next to an Elephant. Any reader willing to wade through a large book has to read Scotland – a Modern History which covers the period from 1700-2007. It will need conversion from epub

·       Understanding Scotland – the sociology of a stateless nation David McCrone (1992) is an important read

·       As is The Scots’ Crisis of Confidence by Carol Craig (2003)

Previous posts in the series

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2022/06/journeys-in-scotland.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2022/06/the-scottish-soul-insiders-tale.html

Journeys in Scotland

I owe my readers an apology – in no way have the two previous posts offered any real insights into the Scottish soul. Pointing you in the direction of five books is all very well but my readers deserve better. When I googled “Scotland’s soul” I was directed mainly to musical groups but did unearth an interesting title The Soul of Scotland (2016) by Harry Reid, the erstwhile editor of “The Glasgow Herald” which, like most newspapers these days, has fallen on very sad times. The only decent contemporary writing nowadays comes from the weekly online “The Scottish Review” to which I directed you all in the last post.

But Scottish writers are alive - and very much kicking. My theory is that English writers (Kingsley Amis, Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, Iris Murdoch) were so caught up in the class system that they couldn’t kick out. The “thrawn” Scots have a different sensibility – it’s not so much that alienation (although some like Irvine Welsh are) but that the difference they feel from the English gives them the additional, more peripheral, vision this blog tries to celebrate

Maurice Lindsay was, for half a century, a pillar of the Scottish literary establishment and left us this great guide A Century of creative Scottish writing 1900-2000. But one very curious omission from his survey was the name of poet Edwin Muir (1887-1959) who may have been too modernist and cosmopolitan for Lindsay – given his later strong European connections. Originally from Orkney, his family had to move to Glasgow and one of his early books was Scottish Journey (1935) which was nicely reviewed recently here 

Muir, torn as a young boy from his pastoral Orkney and landing in the Glasgow slums, likened this shift to travelling forward in time by a hundred years, or witnessing the fall of mankind before one’s very eyes. Such was the enormous difference between these two places. Industrial life brought to Muir and his family the gravest misfortunes one might predict to befall those living amongst such miserable decay and deprivation. These same circumstances led Muir to socialism, an awakening he readily compared to his religious conversion aged fourteen.

It is Muir the socialist and poet whose observations we read as he navigates Scotland in a borrowed motorcar, one that dances ‘like a high-spirited colt’ when pushed anywhere beyond thirty-five miles-per-hour. Muir convinces us from the outset that he is not looking, as a tourist might, for a Scotland historical or romantic, but rather the Scotland which presents itself ‘to one who is not looking for anything in particular, and is willing to believe what his eyes and ears tell him’.

What then, does Muir see? He sees much about Scotland that he admires, dislikes, and much that can only be of hindrance to anything like progress. He understands and effectively articulates the various contradictions and hypocrisies often found strung together in the identity of a place. 

He is, of course, driving – something which would immediately have marked him off as a “toff”. My father and his own father were at that precise time camping – university graduates both – I have their holiday diaries from 1933/34 still here in my mountain house. 

In Edinburgh, this is poignantly characterised by the ugly divide between rich and poor, and the obsessive keeping-up of appearances, despite glaring sanctimony, by the middle-classes. In the Borders, he visits Abbotsford House in Galashiels, once the home of Sir Walter Scott. Scott, along with Burns, whose house is also visited, was a literary figure seen as the embodiment of the kitsch, sentimental ‘Scottishness’ to which Muir and his generation of Scottish writer were so vehemently opposed. For those baptised as the Scottish Renaissance, Scott and Burns represented the idealised Scotland of the tourist; unblemished, quaint, bonnie, and not the Scotland experienced by the majority of its inhabitants. This rather fictitious Scotland contains little remedy for the large-scale unemployment that Muir sees in Glasgow, a city that once housed such misery for him.

 

Nor does the fine imagery of mist-wrapped hills and mirror-like lochs have anything to say about that stage of industrialism, also seen in Glasgow, that stays jammed at human exploitation on its path towards affordable luxury. In the Highlands, a region that really does accommodate the majestic, natural beauty that many mistake for the whole picture, Muir is no less sympathetic towards the ordinary people living there. They are as much thwarted by a crass romanticism belying genuine struggle as the rest of Scotland is.

At his time of visiting, Muir believed the Scottish Highlands to be in a third stage of its decline, something that had begun with the punishment afflicted upon the Highlanders following Culloden. The second phase of decline would, of course, be the Clearances; the forced eviction of thousands and the installation of landlordism where the clan system had previously existed.

The third stage, Muir argues, is symbolised by ‘the pictures of slaughtered animals that disfigure the walls of Highland hotels.’ This is the Highlands as a sporting playground, for its wealthy estate owners, many with little connection to Scotland other than the land they have inherited, and for those who come from elsewhere to enjoy this version of wild Scotland. The majority of locals, growing smaller in number, serve one of two purposes; to cook and clean for these visitors, or to slaughter animals for them; their own form of non-Industrial subjugation.

 

Was the independence effort of the time, the National Party of Scotland, the answer to any of the problems discussed? From Muir, a resounding no. This movement was to the poet an absurd coalition of political beliefs gathered optimistically beneath the banner of self-government. In Muir’s own words, ‘The National Party has nothing behind it but a desire and nothing before it but an ideal.’ Scottish independence, for Muir, would have to mean socialism – one could not be achieved without the other.

Some things have changed, no doubt, since 1935. Nevertheless, Muir teaches us the importance of going and finding out for ourselves, of taking the responsibility as Scots to understand Scotland and all her people. Also, the poet’s remarks about benign, optimistic nationalism not being enough remain entirely pertinent. Belief in Scottish independence must always extend to something other than simple agreement with the basic argument of the party line. For Muir, this means socialism, for others perhaps not. 

Several decades later a similar journey was undertaken to explore how Scotland had changed but called this time “A Scottish Journey” (2018) and made, this time, by motorbike which made the rider a wee bit more accessible. Although the trip was squeezed into a fortnight’s break between teaching.

But the journey I really appreciated was Journeys around Unfamiliar Britain (2016) made on a good old bike by JD Taylor who included Scotland in the tour and took 4 months to achieve. His model was the famous William Cobbett’s Rural Rides made (by horse) in the 1820s. This section from an interview the author did gives a good sense of the guy's style - 

Just as I was interested in the vast majority of people left out of London-focused narratives, so I was interested in the places between or behind official narratives of ‘England’, ‘The North’, ‘Scotland’, etc. On a bike call you can pull over at any point on the road to eat some grub, grab the ear of a passer-by.

 

Q: Where there any points in the journey where you thought ‘enough is enough. I’m going home’? What convinced you to continue?

I never felt like giving up, strange as it seems, given the difficulties I encountered. I was compelled by a feeling of necessity and fate. I was going to complete this regardless of what happened, and that perhaps I had even already completed it, and was now reliving it again and documenting it. Even where I was injured by careless drivers, or became exhausted by long nights. Of course it was very unlikely I was going to succeed, and that also energised me.

 

Q: You briefly mention meeting a young British actor,working as a bartender in a northern pub. That was quite shocking moment in the book, to see a talented and well-known young man in such circumstances. What were your own impressions of this?

Tom Turgoose is known for playing Shaun in the film This is England, a troubled young guy who finds friendship and community among a group of disaffected young skinheads in an ex-industrial Northern town, partly based on Nottingham. It was apt to find him pulling cheap pints of bland beer in a rough-and-tumble Grimsby boozer. His situation mirrored that of his character, enduring and not unhappy in a place and position familiar to many born in the late 1980s-early 1990s in Britain. He was sceptical, sharp-humoured and open-minded, and we talked for a bit. He deserves more work and accolades but, in a heartbreaking way, so do so many talented young people whose interests have been abandoned by a reactionary political establishment. I am thinking here of the many musicians, artists, writers, actors, educators and community workers I have had the fortune to call friends. They struggle on, flinty-humoured and hard-bitten, ambivalent about it all, highly educated and prematurely aged. They deserve much more than this.

 

Q: The Raleigh bike you purchased for seventy pounds at times becomes its own, quite sadistic, character within the book. It sometimes feels like the thing is holding you back with its many imperfections. Why didn’t you go with a more expensive, or at the least, more reliable bike?

No, the old Raleigh bike is the hero of the book! It just about held it together over those thousand or so miles. I consciously wanted to distance myself from the lycra-clad, middle-class professionalisation of cycling, just as I sought a similar distance from the professionalisation of politics and political theory. Using a cheap everyday road bike mirrored that of taking and using the stories and language of real individuals, as they are. And of course I was skint, and couldn’t afford much better! But I wanted to show what could be done, and focus on the journey rather than the tedious data of mileage or performance that distract so many cyclists. So I didn’t have a milometer, I wore jeans and a shirt, a cape when it rained (until that fell off the bike too), and just got on with it. And I regret nothing at all. 

Background

The most famous trip in Scotland was undertaken in 1773 by the great Dr Johnson and his biographer James Boswell, resulting in two books – the first written (from memory) a couple of years later by Samuel Johnson and entitled A Journey to the Western Isles (1775)

Boswell was a Scot who memorialised the life of Samuel Johnson so brilliantly that he effectively created the genre of the biography. It took Boswell a decade, however, before he published, from detailed notes he had taken during the journey, Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785)  

After that, it became fashionable for others to undertake the same journey eg Our Journey to the Hebrides (Pennell 1889) and Footsteps of Dr Johnson (Scotland) GBN Hill (1890)

And this is a nice recent tribute to Boswell which also mentions some of the more recent books which have repeated the journey Out of Johnson’s Shadow – James Boswell as a Travel Writer; Julian M Griffin (2017)

The Scottish Soul – the insiders’ tale

And indeed, the literary did win out in the battle for the Scottish soul – although the non-fiction titles are anything but dull.

I start with a wonderful collection “Who Built Scotland? 25 journeys in search of a nation” (epub 2017) which showcases the local contemporary talent of poet/essayist Kathleen Jamie, writers James Robertson, Alex McCall Smith and Alistair Moffat and broadcaster James Crawford – with their evocations of Scottish architecture, libraries, archaeology and ruins.

My only beef is that their 25 selections are perhaps a trite too obvious – where, for example, is my home town of Greenock which boasts such luminaries as novelists John Galt,  George Blake and Alan Sharp; poet WS Graham and theatre director Bill Bryden ?

Kathleen Jamie was recently named Scotland’s “Makar” and can be seen here reciting a couple of poems here 

My second choice is slightly unusual in that it goes to an online magazine “The Scottish Review” whose anthologies of great short essays can be fully downloaded here. The weekly represents the true spirit of the country – with essays freely contributed by philosophers, historians, journalists, even the odd politician. It was started by journalist Kenneth Roy whose journalism lives on in The Invisible Spirit – a life of post-war Scotland 1945-75 (2013). Even his memorial service gives a certain sense of the society he lived in 

My third choice moves us into the non-fiction and is from a real original – historian Christopher Harvie who spent some 25 years at Tubingen University before returning to Scotland in 2007 to become a SNP member of the new Scottish Parliament (for 4 years only) He writes with extensive allusions and real panache. His Scotland – a short history was originally published in 2002 and later editions don’t really take account of the considerable scholarship which has taken place since.

But it’s still a great read – as is my final choice The Scottish Enlightenment – how Scotland invented the modern world by an American, Arthur Henman (2001) which can be read in full here. Reviewer have been a bit sniffy about this book – with its typically American sub-title – but it is well-crafted and holds the reader. I would love to know what Harvie made of the book - but can't unearth any comment

The Scottish Soul – from the outside

Skimming the books about Scandinavia got me thinking about how contemporary Scotland might look to an outsider. Of course, having lived for more than half of my adult life abroad does make me a bit of an outsider – what visits I’ve made to the country since 1990 have been short, with 2018 being the only time I spent a few weeks in it. I did. however, have the temerity to produce a little E-book after the September 2014 referendum - based on the posts in my blog as it followed the 2 year discussion which took place in Scotland about its future 

The Scandinavians attribute their good fortune to the “folk-school” tradition which started in Denmark in the 1840s and soon spread to their neighbours. And part of that reflected the German concept of “Bildung” – which is much wider than the british understanding of “education” as explained in this short article. The Danish schools were designed to help the rural poor develop the skills which would be useful to them as they developed their agricultural system and was very much about developing their character and identity as Danes. And that same commitment can be seen in contemporary Germany with the strong emphasis on industry and on the training sector which has almost the same status as universities. 

Of course, the Scots have long been proud of their democratic approach to education – with schools and universities having been open to talent for centuries. Indeed in the 15^th century, Scotland had 3 Universities to England’s 2 – and this increased by the end of the 16^th century to a numerical advantage of 5-2. There has been less reason in the last century to celebrate what one important book published in 1961 called “The Democratic Intellect” by Scottish philosopher and historian of ideas, George Davie, who followed up with “The Crisis of the Democratic Intellect” (1986). Broadly speaking, Davie is concerned with the relationship between ‘the experts’ and ‘the people’. He states his overall case towards the end of the second book: 

The words “democratic intellect” offer a twentieth-century formulation of an old problem. Does the control of a group (of whatever kind) belong, as of right, to the few (the experts) exclusively, and not at all to the ignorant many? Or are the many entitled to share the control, because the limited knowledge of the many, when it is pooled and critically restated through mutual discussion, provides a lay consensus capable of revealing certain of the limitations of interest in the experts’ point of view? Or thirdly it may be held that this consensus knowledge of the many entitles them to have full control, excluding the experts.7

This is the first of five books I have chosen to reveal Scotland’s soul. The other four I will unveil tomorrow – although I’ve just realised they are all non-fiction. I’ve actually read more (Scottish – and Irish) fiction than I tend to let on so I may need to let this run longer as one of the blog’s series.