HISTORY as an EMETIC (Or what to think of during a general election.)
April 3rd, 2010
By Ian Hamilton
Scottish history is a regulated industry. Any non academic writing a new history is defiled from a great height by those who regard the job as theirs.
High on a branch of the ordure tree sits holy Tom Devine. ‘There is only one view of Scottish history and it’s mine,’ he says, his mouth clenched over many resplendent chins. Recently Neil Oliver published a popular book. On the ordure tree success is unforgivable.
‘Gardey loo, Neil!’
Splaaaat!
It’s just over a hundred years since the first Professor of Scottish History was appointed to any university. Hume Brown was his name. I bought my copy of Hume Brown in November 1949 and for a year studied Scottish History at Glasgow from its two volumes. None other was drawn to my attention. That was the state of knowledge sixty years ago. Now history is bred in the bone of us all.
From the contemplation of the bones of our forefathers I turn to the English general election. There is a handful of seats in Scotland too but we still don’t matter much. We don’t rate time on the telly, or maybe they’re a little bit feart of us. Time is on Scotland’s side. As an old man I’ve seen much of it. In the nineteen-forties Scottish history was a dead end. Look at it now.
This raises the questions, what history is for? What are nations for? Without history you can’t have a nation. Without a nation you can’t have your own viewpoint. A nation is a prism through which to look at the universe. Inside a nation we fight our differences. Looking outwards we forget to fight and regard the long perspective of wonder itself. That’s something London has lost. Inside the M75 there lies a nation state. It gathers others’ wealth to it. It looks only inwards. That’s why its election is so dull.
But back to history. It’s better than any Party Political Broadcasts.
Bonnie Prince Charlie was a wee Italian drunk. The right side won the battle of Culloden. Only fools wanted to restore the Stewarts. The reign of the second last Stewart was known as ‘The Killing Times’. He had you shot if you didn’t swear allegiance to London rule and its God. London doesn’t go that far today. It’s too busy admiring itself. (I would have said ‘wanking’ but Jeannette won’t let me.)
Talking of God it was us Scots who abolished Him. David Hume made His existence unprovable and James Hutton, with the first study of systematic geology, screwed up His job description. He did it by looking at the Salisbury Crags while Adam Smith was writing the Wealth of Nations. Meanwhile the Gentle Locheil was sending his surplus crofters into slavery in the Caribbean and leading his tribesmen to rise and follow Chairlie. Hear the pibroch rise and fall? Truly a nation is made of many interpretations.
My interpretation is that the nation goes to the polls awake again however we vote. We have been long asleep. During that sleep a few of us were enriched by free trade within the British comity of subject nations, particularly by slavery. These times are past. History shows us how things change. We need no more tartan humbug invented by that charlatan Walter Scott with his silly clan chiefs, now called lairds, tripping over their cromachs on their way to their local Highland Games. Meanwhile London sits looking at nothing except the riches it gathers from the weak who refuse to look after themselves.
God, whom David Hume and James Hutton abolished, looks after those who look after themselves. As a nation we have given much. Read Arthur Herman’s book, How Scotland invented the Modern World *. While inventing it we also tried to reinvent ourselves. During the greatest upsurge of human thought since Classical Greece we tried to master the English language, learning it under the tutelage of an Irish actor. We thought our native Scots tongue inadequate. We’re always reinventing ourselves. We fight about it. It’s our hobby. The Enlightenment came despite the Union or because of the Union. Take your pick because none of us agrees.
Back to the election. A handful of MPs of one party or another will make not the slightest difference to the way we think. Yet it will make a difference to the pernicious doctrine of ‘London takes all’. Maybe it’s just worth while voting.
Far beyond any election one thing abides. Scotland has a duty to the world. That duty is to be itself.
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*Arthur Herman is an American Professor. He has searched and can find no Scottish family lineage and has no prejudice in our favour. His book was published in America under the title given above. Here the title had to be changed. It is called The Scottish Enlightenment. The American title might have frightened the horses.
How I wish I could go on! John Knox’s ideal of a school in every parish may have been to train maggot-minded Church of Scotland Minsters but once you start giving knowledge you can’t stop. It gave us the best educated people in Europe. It gave us the Enlightenment and it will give us whatever we have the courage to pass on to the world through the prism of our own viewpoint. Each one of us, human or nation, sees things differently. Maybe one of us one day will see the truth
April 3rd, 2010 at 1:05 pm
Aye, Ian and it was you who put Scotland and her history back in place on on that great Christmas Day 1950. I don’t agree with much of what you write here,but long may we GOMS (Grumpy Old Men) keep leading the agenda.
April 3rd, 2010 at 1:33 pm
You see the Imperial City State of London for what it is, Ian - a parasite. It takes our best in human and natural resources and its wealth drips down so that, when it reaches Scotland, it’s a mere spritz of piss.
April 4th, 2010 at 1:06 pm
[...] Hamilton QC has a worthwhile thought of two on history as an emetic – and throws an elbow at “Holy Tom Devine” while he’s at it, rejecting the pious [...]
April 4th, 2010 at 4:45 pm
You always have some interesting thoughts in spite of your anger toward any who see Scotland differently than yourself. How dare anyone in Scotland value their heritage? For someone who admits that without a history, there is no nation, that’s a pretty strange argument.
The problem with your comments about getting rid of the pernicious Stewarts is that they were replaced with a family equally pernicious which, in Scotland, had a bloody hand and were at best a pretty useless lot (managed to lose you half a continent in America as I recall).
The “Killing Times” were no more bloody than quite a number of other times in English history. Perhaps more unforgivable when led by someone labeled (rather falsely at that point since one rather needs to bide in Scotland to be a Scot one would think) as a Scot.
You want Scotland to divest itself of what much of the country sees as its heritage and replace it with that someone once invented something. Ian… Ian… Ian…
By the way, I rather doubt your friend who wrote that rather interesting book can say for a certainty he has no Scots lineage — if there be such a thing since you manage to be almost as mongrel as we Americans — since darn few Americans can say such.
Between the Hanovers (who killed and shipped quite a few Scots but you seem to find that killing time quite all right) and the landowners, we managed to end up with a fair number of contentious Scots in our numbers and a very substantial percentage of us claim to have Scottish lineage when it suits us.
April 4th, 2010 at 11:12 pm
“…but long may we GOMS (Grumpy Old Men) keep leading the agenda.”
Oh Adam, Adam, what about Eve?
April 5th, 2010 at 3:20 pm
Arthur Herman’s book is quite brilliant, it shows the Scots developed a way of thinking beyond anything the world had seen before. Ironically, it was the church that inadvertently put this change in motion.
But as well as Hutton & Hume, there’s a third Scot that deserves a mention, one who really did invent the modern world with his discoveries. He was James Clerk Maxwell, the most under praised Scotsman in history.
April 5th, 2010 at 4:44 pm
I agree about Clerk Maxwell. He also caused delight by setting exam questions in verse. One on the acceleration of particle sticks in my mind.
Gin a body meet a body flying through the air.
Gin a body hit a body it will end up where?
To Mr Tomlin I say this,
Never lose the absurd delight of taking sides on the long view back to where we come from. Be assured that whoever we are now we were on both sides then.
Ian
April 5th, 2010 at 6:18 pm
Stuart said:”Ironically, it was the church that inadvertently put this change in motion.”
There was nothing inadvertent in the Church of Scotland’s aproach to education. The leaders of the Reformation in the First Book of Discipline set out the social and education programme which they considered as a central part of the Church. Every Parish was to have a school and a teacher who was a University graduate and every boy AND girl was to go to school from the age of six.
Despite a shortage of funds, by the 169os the Church had almost achieved this goal and an Education Act passed by the Scots Parliament towards the end of the 1690s made it compulsory for all parishes to have a school and teacher.
It was the first system of universal education in the world. It was not perfect but it did give Scotland an unprecedented level of literacy and once people are taught to read they learn to think and gain the confidence to speak.
April 6th, 2010 at 12:14 am
Brilliant stuff Ian.
You’re one of the few Independence Bloggers out there who tells it like it really is. Too much wishy-washy stuff emanates from so many others.
We are an English Colony until we vote for Independence.
April 6th, 2010 at 1:05 am
I got a book token for my birthday, having grown tired of books about the economy , I chanced upon your book, and it was signed too , I’ll keep it in good nick just in case.
Onto the subject in hand, having an Uncle who spent all his spare hours in the Library in Edinburgh and when he was on duty at the Castle going through the old records, he certainly had an alternative view from Walter Scott’s view of shortbread tin Scotland, he would oft call the Bonnie one, “the wee Italian poofter”
He maintains from going through old military records that the army knew exactly where Charlie was, and did not finish him of for want of making him a martyr.
Anyway as much as it is very interesting reading the history of Scotland to when ice covered the land, I now go on the basis that I can’t change the past, for all it’s ills and wrongs, but also its glorious advancements, but I can in my own wee way change the future
April 6th, 2010 at 8:39 am
You seem to be making an industry out of supporting all the wrong people, Ian - Wendy Alexander, Iain McWhirter, Steven Purcell. Now Neil Oliver, who used an episode of a TV programme ostensibly about the British coast as a platform to enthuse about the Union. I’ve heard of Devil’s Advocate - but Devil’s QC? Keep trailing your coat like this, Ian, and you’ll lose it.
Oliver’s solitary merit is his astonishing ability, like the wee girl in that scary movie, to rotate his head through 180 degrees and speak to someone behind him while walking.
Glad your absence from blogging was a short one, though!
April 7th, 2010 at 6:46 pm
The Scottish Education Act of 1496, although it only called for the education of the eldest son of men of property, was nevertheless one of the first examples of compulsory education in the World and I believe the first in Europe (discounting the military education of ancient Sparta).
Note this was pre-Reformation.
There had been a long history of Scottish erudition even before that back through the Makars yea unto Duns Scotus and even before that the writers in O.W. and O.I. that inhabited pre-Scotland.
The Reformation in Scotland certainly took up the cause of universal education with vigour, citing the need for everyone to be able to read scripture for themselves. It definitely facilitated the development of Scotland to the point of being able to claim to be the first fully literate nation in he World within a few years of the 1696 ACT.
However, although the need for universal literacy was a base objective of the Reformation as stated by Calvin himself, we must answer the question as to why, in Scotland, that aspect was evidently pursued more than elsewhere (e.g. England) where there was also reformation.
It seems that already there was, for whatever reason, already a desire for learning in our culture.
April 7th, 2010 at 10:53 pm
What a joy it is to read the comments this piece has brought to it.
Ian
April 8th, 2010 at 2:31 pm
Dougie’s post set me thinking. Too much coffee I suspect!
Is it possible to support Scottish independence and at the same time believe that the Union has been neither “all bad” nor “all good”? For instance, without the British Empire, would the ideas engendered by the Scottish Enlightenment have “invented the Modern World”
Mike
P.S. Ian - loved the line re “the horses”
April 9th, 2010 at 1:05 am
Mike,
I know where you are coming from. It is a reasonable hypothesis to envisage that influence, through Union, on a larger country, i.e. England, would help spread the pearls of wisdom and there may be some truth in that.
On the other hand, the Scottish Enlightenment had begun long BEFORE Union with England and had already influenced England and elsewhere before then. As well as the aforementioned primary educational provisions, the tertiary educational infrastructure build necessary to carry forward an Enlightenment, had been undertaken in Scotland throughout the 17th C e.g. the philosophical basis of Scots Law develoed not just the Law but philosophy itself, the formation of various academic societies and institutions etc.
To give one example, consider James Gregory the mathematician and physicist. Someone mentioned James Clerk Maxwell, who although certainly hard done by by the Anglo-centric Establishment in Britain is nevertheless accorded something of his true standing amongst physicists around the World. Einstein kept a picture of him on his study wall and said he was the greatest ever physicist. He is indeed regarded in the science community as being one of the holy trinity of physics, himself, Einstein and Newton.
However Gregory is even more badly done by because even amongst mathematicians and physicists the value of his contribution is not yet fully recognised yet it was he and not Newton who invented the reflecting telescope, it was he who first came up with methods for differentiation and integration and who showed they were reciprocals (the calculus), it was he who provided the first fundamental proof of the Calculus, it was he (probably) who was the first to identify and test for the difference between converging and diverging series, it was he who first came up with what is now called Taylor’s series, it was he who came up with a series calculation for Pi, it was he who identified the diffraction grating, it was he who mathematically described planetary motion and made predictions like those from the transit of Venus confirmed decades after his death. These ideas were communicated by books published in Italy and elsewhere and through the interlocutor Collins to Newton and ‘by grapevine’ to Leibniz, Hooke etc. And all before the Union.
He does not get the credit he should although that is slowly changing.
BTW the Gregory family had several spectacularly successful intellects.
And then we have French awareness of Scottish achievement as perhaps exemplified by Voltaire’s famous quote “It is to Scotland we must look for all our ideas of civilization” and Kant, although never leaving his native city, was nevertheless fully informed of the output of the Scottish philosophers particularly as he himself was of Scottish ancestry.
Hume, like so many Scots, had to go abroad to gain recognition. Even after completing his world famous Treatise on Human Reason in France the English critics panned it for long enough before bowing to its international acclaim .
And on the more literary front the works of Burns were accepted throughout Europe with famous composers writing tunes for them.
MacPherson’s ‘Works of Ossian’ was hugely influential in Europe, sold over a million copies, the first non-biblical best seller, but again was denounced in England especially by Johnston.
Then there is the development of evolution theory in Scottish academia which in addition to the French Lamarkian model also had a Scottish born strain of selection and competition going back well into the Enlightenment era. Yet even though the theory of natural selection had been published by Matthew in Scotland (and London) before Darwin’s voyage on the Beagle it gets little mention (although Darwin himself did concede Matthew had the theory first) . Nor the fact that Darwin got his degree at Edinburgh and could scarcely have avoided learning of these theories.
So there is really quite a lot of evidence to say that the Scottish ideas would certainly have been communicated to the World and in some instances in spite of the elephant in the room.
April 9th, 2010 at 7:53 pm
Cheers Chicmac,
Fascinating and informative post - I can even forgive you for mentioning Calculus. After 40 years it still has the power to bring me out in a cold sweat!
Largely the points you raise concern the communication of “big ideas” at an academic level. Undoubtedly highly significant but would there not have been another level at which having people “on the ground” was important? Take, for example, the influence of Scottish thinking on the framing of the American Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.Would Scots have been welcome as “foreigners” in an English colony?
Since we can’t change history, much of this is just speculation, so I will leave you with a fact. I read recently that cricket was first encouraged in Australia by one Lachlan McQuarrie circa 1810. Howzat for a time bomb!