Flagstone for a future
George Gunn
It was Voltaire who noted that history can be best described as the sound of wooden clogs going up stairs and of velvet slippers coming down. So it is that the best ideas approach the fulcrum of realisation, proud and strong and resolute, only to be rendered less than the beautiful thing they are by the process of fear. Fear is the enemy of the idea and fear arises when an individual and a society are denied the necessary information they need, in order to implement the capacity for generosity, which is the human weather an idea needs in order to grow.
I plant my idea in my native land of Caithness. I make no apology for this – on the contrary, I embrace the maxim of the American novelist Carson McCullers, who said that ‘if you have no-where to come from, you have no-where to go’.
Since the mid 1950s Caithness has been enmeshed in the tangle of a dream. The siting of a huge industrial-military nuclear complex at Dounreay, on our northern coast, put our imaginations to sleep. So hypnotised by the somnabulance of money and the Official Secrets Act have we been that only now are we slowly being awoken from this material and cultureless dwam by the hard metal knocking of Dounreay’s decommissioning. The problem, after such a long mental hibernation, is that nobody knows what to do about anything. It’s as if the population of Caithness has forgotten how to live.
So it is because the natives are no longer able to recognise their own historic landscape that I propose that Caithness is recognised by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site. There are very few places where one can witness the Stone Age and the modern world in such close proximity.
As a World Heritage Site – Scotland only has four – Caithness would cease being a secret to its own inhabitants and allow the rest of the world to view this extraordinary place in all its built and natural glory. It would also allow the place to be protected from cynical manifestations, such as Dounreay, and to be sustainably developed in accordance with nature. For once Caithness could be in control of her economic future.
This is the first part of my idea and is the flagstone base on which the second part rests. The University of the Highlands and Islands was always a good idea. The current model which is based on the notion that it must be a ‘business’ university is a product of Thatcherite Britain and must be changed. Why? Because, in my experience of working as a tutor at the UHI, none of the loose federation of further education colleges which make up the UHI – which stretches from Shetland to Kintyre – actually understands what the UHI is about or could become, or even that they are part of it. What the business ethos does is to force these colleges to compete against each other instead of working together and the result is that they all have little or no cultural curriculum.
What I propose is turning North Highland College in Thurso into a centre for the study of philosophy. The present education system teaches our young ones a raft of salient facts about not a lot and no-one is encouraged to question anything – not at school, university, in the media and even, sadly, in the arts. Fear of financial failure ensures conformity which is the death of ideas.
My idea for North Highland College is that anyone who enrols for anything at the college must first undertake a one-year course in philosophy, the art and science of questioning. I imagine it to be a cross between the Symposium of Plato and the Bardic School at Finlaggan. On this course all students will be schooled in the first principles of philosophy in order to encourage them into the habit of thinking and once thinking becomes attractive, then from this, gradually, ideas will emerge – ideas about their future as individuals, their society and how it should be shaped. Above all they would be directed to question what is of value, to take stock of the material world for what it is and not how it can be exploited for profit.
Sean Haldane, who is both a poet and a neuroscientist, has said recently that we are not fully human without memory. Having the archaic memory of your native place valued and given status, such as a World Heritage Site, can mark as a signifier to the expansion of the mind if that value and status are incorporated into education. My contention is that the study of philosophy should be our primary education. Professor Haldane also reminds us that the Scots word ‘mind’ means ‘to remember’.
To mind our past and to debate our future, as a matter of course, is an idea which can only be to the betterment of Scotland. I am willing for Caithness, which is the place in our country where the Celtic and Norse minds merge, to be the experiment.
What we need are alternatives to the current accepted monologue on political and economic behaviour and we need no cold war geographical isolation or Official Secrets Act oppression to make this work – in fact we need the opposite, so that Caithness can be at the centre of the future and its beauty and new ideas can help ensure our survival. Surely this must be to the betterment of Scotland?
Tuesday: Lorn Macintyre
George Gunn is founder and artistic director of Grey Coast Theatre Company, based in Caithness, and is well known for his playwriting.
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