Scrieving Scotland: Let’s Talk About Culture and Politics After the Singularity

Scotland is the land where ideal has never, even for an instant, coincided with fact.
Tom Nairn, 1968.

The publication of a collection of essays and poems on Scotland in the Northern Irish journal, Irish Pages, gives us cause, and pause, to consider once more the relationship between culture and politics. I use it here as a jumping-off point to make some general observations about this relationship, or rather, how it has been construed in writing, scrieving, about Scotland. 

Insofar as there is a thread to these essays and poems, it is fair to say that it is a pessimistic one, but as Tom Nairn implied above, that’s a fairly old and comforting sang. The editors, Kathleen Jamie and Don Paterson, aver that ‘we are poets, primarily, and our work is not overtly political in itself’. That, however, has never stopped them, or anybody, from being so. Revealingly, and almost as a throw-away line, they admit to being ‘elders’ (over-60s) who speak out of a cultural memory which brought us to the brink of independence in 2014. 

Still, we enter familiar and muddy waters. The collection is in an Irish journal ‘because no Scottish journal exists which is capable or willing to perform the task’. One of the co-editors Don Paterson entitles his essay ‘D’Ou Venons-Nous/ Que Somme-Nous/ Ou Allons-Nous’, for reasons best known to himself; maybe it sounded better in French. It contains a familiar refrain. ‘The old lullaby of “too wee, too poor and too stupid” gets an outing, as does our old pal, self-loathing, eating away at our sense of ourselves. The Scottish universities get it in the neck for discriminating against the Scottish middle class as well as working-class Scots. Really? ‘The class – an xenophobic shaming of these students… is now routinely reported (‘routinely’ being a useful weasel-word in these matters). Above all, Paterson says ‘the Cringe’ is back, and ‘our low-ebb confidence currently offers far too little resistance’. More really? One is tempted to offer a deal: I’ll stop writing bad poetry, Don, if you stopping doing cod-social analysis. 

Thinking about Tom Nairn’s Scotland

Strangely enough, the past-master of this psychoanalysing the nation, Tom Nairn, doesn’t get a mention in this book. Tom of course didn’t invent Scotland as a psychiatric condition, but he gave it voice, including the text for today’s sermon with which we began. When he died in early 2023, The Herald referred to him as the ‘godfather’ of Scottish nationalism. Nairn’s focus, however, was on the perceived deformities of Scottish culture, rather than what he dismissively called ‘mere constitutionalism’, and the ‘tired legalistic arguments for independence’. He was far more interested in the ‘nation’, the cultural dimension, than the ‘state’, the political one.

Nairn employed the concept of ‘neurosis’, whereby in the nineteenth century the Scottish bourgeoisie had to ‘sublimate’ (another psychiatric trope) because ‘there was no call for the usual services’ of leading the nation to full independence. Thus it was that ‘a strange sort of sub-national culture emerged’, and ‘the best title for this is … cultural sub-nationalism’.

Any discussion of the relationship between culture and political change in Scotland inevitably encounters Tom Nairn’s view that Scottish culture is (or was) a roadblock to political change. 

Nairn excoriated Scottish nationalism in 1968: ‘SNP Nationalists are merely lumpen-provincials whose parochialism finds its adequate expression in the asinine idea that a bourgeois parliament and an army will rescue the country from provincialism’. 

If Nairn was the ‘godfather of Scottish nationalism’, this amounts to disowning one’s offspring. He cited in co-disapproval the work of literary scholar David Craig ‘who has outlined the problem [of deformed cultural expression] with admirable precision’. Craig, however, was no (Scottish) nationalist. Consistent in his beliefs, he wrote in London Review of Books in 2014 at the time of the Scottish referendum that he ‘mistrusted any party which is founded on nationhood as such … and for that reason, if I still lived in Scotland, I would vote No’.

Disappearing and Reappearing Scotlands

Much of the writing about Scottish culture and politics in the twentieth century assumed that ‘Scotland’ had effectively ceased to be; it had come to an end. It was common to see Scotland’s literature as ‘fundamentally a dead literature, the literature of a nation which once existed but now has no independent identity’ (Cairns Craig, 1999). Much of the commentary was elegiac, which saw Scottish culture as doomed to failure, conspiring to produce a cultural wasteland.

And then in the 1980s and 1990s the old wisdom that Scottish culture was ineradicably deformed, thus preventing ‘proper’ political change, was turned on its head. It shifted to the assertion that it was cultural change wot won it, responsible for bringing about key political-constitutional changes. If ‘culture’ had prevented political change, then in post-1970s Scotland, it was deemed responsible for making political change happen. That, at least, was the claim. It fitted in with the shift in intellectual perspectives generally that ‘culture’ rather than ‘structure’ explained social change; what became known as the ‘cultural turn’. Thus was Kitschland created. ‘If there is one thing that the Scots in particular know all about, it is self-colonisation. They lived it for three hundred years after the Treaty of Union in 1707’.

What’s wrong with that? If Scottish culture was so doun-hauden that it was unable to generate political change, how was that possible? And what changed to make it possible? 

Cairns Craig (no relation to David) coined the term ‘nostophobia’ (phobia of home) to refer to cultural pessimism about Scotland. Consider, for example, the writer Andrew O’Hagan, who in 2002, shortly after the Scottish parliament was set up, observed: ‘the half-hearted nation [Scotland] will want to hold fast to its grievances … the problem is not the parliament, it’s the people, and the people’s drowsy addiction to imagined injury’. Recall Bertolt Brecht’s comment in his poem The Solution: ‘Would it not be easier in that case for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?’, and O’Hagan would have been aware of that. By 2017, O’Hagan (and Scotland, presumably) had moved on. In a lecture at the Edinburgh Book Festival that year, he recanted. 

The poet Donnie O’Rourke claimed in 1994 that: ‘Scotland’s artists did more than its politicians to dream up a new Scotland’; quite a claim, and note the word ‘dream’. Academic writers made similar observations. Robert Crawford, in 2000, thought that ‘devolution and a reassertion of Scottish nationhood were imagined by poets and writers’. And Cairns Craig: ‘if politics and votes were the means of bringing the parliament into existence, they were not its direct cause’; nevertheless, he continued, the parliament ‘has been built on the foundations of a revolution in the nation’s culture’. He argued that after 1979, and the ‘failure’ of the referendum that year, saw a change; ‘as though in defiance of the stalled political reality in which it is trapped, Scottish literature of the 1980s and 1990s drew its energy from discovery of a variety of routes into alternative ontologies where the imaginary can become real’.

What was perceived as a weakness – Scots, by and large, spoke and wrote in English – came to be considered a strength in that there were fewer barriers to be considered ‘Scottish’; the tariff to belonging was, so to speak, sufficiently low. Hence, externally, there were few barriers in imperial influence to Scots on the make. Internally, it mattered too, because territorial inclusion rather than ethnic belonging, as expressed through language, was easier to effect.

The rise of Scottish culture: from supposed impotence to omnipotence

There is something odd here. If Scottish culture was so doon-hauden as to make political change impossible, how come such a thing came about? The trouble is that both assertions are far too stark, for they attribute a direct relationship between culture and politics without much in between. What is missing is the concept of ‘civil society’, that relatively dense network of social institutions which permeate any society, and which act as a transmission belt for cultural and political change. 

Nairn did not think much of this ‘institutional identity’, and poured scorn upon the notion, and upon ideas of ‘civil society’, which he called the poor relation of ‘political society’ Crucially, in his view, ‘real [national] identity’ could not surface, and thus a ‘display identity is needed to fill the gap’ (ibid. 207). 

Nevertheless, institutions and organisations are the carriers of values and tropes, such that civil society represents the sphere of culture in the broadest sense. It is where values and meanings are established, where they are debated, contested and changed. Nairn had little truck with ‘civil society’, seeing it as a poor substitute for a state, and its practitioners too infected by feelings of inadequacy. 

Furthermore, we are not the people we were, nor is our culture. Recall the editors of Irish Pages referring to themselves as ‘elders’ (older folk; nothing to do with the Kirk). They observe that ‘the somewhat younger generation … have had to develop their artistic practice and their careers in a digital age’. As a consequence, culture, Scottish or otherwise, ain’t what it used to be. 

Culture has a double-edge: it is both descriptive of a society, but also prescriptive for, in terms of what its desired values are deemed to be. Scottish culture’ should be pluralised, given the multiplicity of symbolic systems. We (and especially non-elders) live in an age which is no longer simply the printed word. Scrieving has gone digital. To borrow from that ancient scriever, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, ‘A new generation comes up that will know them not, except as a memory in a so ng, they passed with the things that seemed good to them with loves and desires that grow dim and alien in the days to be’ (from Sunset Song). Still, ‘culture’ is the essence of ‘nation-ness’, and, by and large, arguments about Scotland relate to the singularity of its culture in the round. It is, however, in the hands of a younger generation whose memes and takes are different. Their views are shaped in a different world. 

Culture and Politics in Scotland in the Digital Age

And what of the relationship between culture and the new politics? They are separate spheres which collide with each other periodically, and so inform each other but not in predictable ways. Baith gang their ane gyte. Nevertheless, they bleed into each other. The Scottish Parliament isn’t simply a debating chamber, but a cultural institution whether it likes it or not. People’s views, shaped in a maelstrom of influences, are multifarious, and brought to bear on the ‘political’, as we saw in 2014, and will see so again, in due course. 

It might be comforting and comfortable to fall back into our old mindset that Scots are too wee, puir and stupid to advance further, but it makes for poor sociology and poor politics. The name of the game is convincing people that they’d be better off, in all senses, living in an independent state (whatever that may mean these days). Psychiatric tropes have had their day, and there is no point resurrecting them to explain (the lack of) political change. We should have better things to do, as well as doing them much better.