Scotland
in the
heat
Listening
to the
other side
R D Kernohan discovers common ground in unexpected places
Get SR free in
your inbox three
times a week
Click here
The Store
The new space for articles you may
have missed
The history of
our post-war progress
is not all it seems
Click here for
Jill Stephenson
The Cafe
Unlike many publications SR doesn’t have an online comment facility – we prefer a more considered approach. The Cafe is our readers’ forum. If you would like to contribute to it, please email islay@scottishreview.net
Today’s banner
North Berwick flowers
Photograph by
Islay McLeod
Listening
to the
other side
RD Kernohan
I never made ‘Desert Island Discs’, but I once got my favourite records played on one of its poor relations on Radio Scotland. All that was missing was the promise of the Bible, Shakespeare, and the one luxury – which in my case, to the surprise of both the unco guid and the righteous left, would have been a copy of ‘The Good Soldier Schweik’ by Jaroslav Hasek.
Schweik (or Svejk in the original Czech) is an untidy epic of the first world war with a malingering anti-hero, often scurrilous, occasionally blasphemous, savagely anti-clerical, full of good jokes in bad taste, and mockingly hostile not only to deference but to all authority. Its author was a Communist of sorts for a time, but more notable for insobriety, unreliability, and bigamy. For all that, I cherish his book not as a mere guilty pleasure but as a learning experience, for it teaches a lot about human nature and the decay of society when authority no longer commands or deserves respect.
I also suggest my experience of it as a rather extreme example of a tendency that ought to be encouraged, even self-imposed, among dogmatists of all political and theological (or anti-theological) persuasions: a readiness to learn from the other sides and to discover common ground in unexpected places.
This is easier with some authors than others. Graduates of the Dawkins School of Godlessness tend to an aggressive intolerance which provokes rather than challenges religious believers. Faith can be more severely tested, and perhaps refined and clarified when it encounters old-time irreligion. Read, for example, the great 19th-century French refugee from a priestly vocation, Ernest Renan, to discover how Christian love can apparently survive the loss of Christian faith, or read the ironical Gibbon, reconverted from Rome into a sceptical Protestantism of the ‘Enlightenment’, before preparing sermons or even encyclicals on the glories of apostolic tradition.
Even in religious matters robust readiness for controversy doesn’t necessarily confine the preacher’s influence. There is a Christian polemical tradition which, even if you set Jesus in a unique and special context, certainly goes back to St Paul and reappears not only in various saints of the Roman Calendar but in Luther and even at times in C S Lewis and George MacLeod, who was far greater as evangelist than as ecclesiastical or secular politician.
In politics a certain aggression bordering on intolerance seems even less of a barrier to winning improbable friends and influencing opponents. That may be because it is easier in politics than in religion to pick and choose from polemicists’ ideas, especially once they are dead. That may be why I (and I hope many other Tories) find it surprisingly easy to venerate some of the saints of the British radical tradition. I even have a soft spot for Michael Foot, whose true vocation was to be an eloquent nuisance in speech and print and whose talents were wasted once he was trapped as a minister and ineffective party leader; and as I get older I warm a little to Gladstone, the great Victorian who became quite radical in his later years when Randolph Churchill denounced him as ‘an old man in a hurry’.
There is, for example, William Cobbett, a longer-lived contemporary of Burns, whom I think of as measuring up perfectly to Burns‘s specification of ‘the man of independent mind’. Cobbett rode around like Defoe (also reckoned a dangerous character in his day) and wrote up his travels in a way that foreshadows George Orwell’s excursions to Wigan Pier and the workhouses of England. He may seem an eccentric in his passion that the English peasantry should eat good bread rather than waste fossil-fuel or wood in boiling potatoes; but in that, and in his denunciation of the sprawling ‘Great Wen’ of London, he was a Green ahead of his time.
Then there is Orwell himself. I have a few uncertainties about him. I’m not sure whether I’d have liked him much face to face and, although ‘Homage to Catalonia’ sketches the human face of war in a way that transcends politics, I’m saddened by its indifference to the savage anti-religious fanaticism which the Spanish left contributed to the mutual and murderous frenzy of the civil war. Nor am I sure where Orwell’s radical democratic patriotism would have taken him, if he had survived longer. But I am sure that he wrote a perfect, wonderful work of polemical art in ‘Animal Farm’ and the most powerful tract of his century in ‘1984’. And perhaps no-one but Churchill expressed so well what was best in the Britain of 1940.
At this point I already hear the rumblings of Scot Nat readers. ‘These,’ they murmur, ‘are British patriots, even English ones, albeit Orwell’s birth-name suggested a distant Scottish ancestry and Gladstone was of undiluted Scottish descent. Your thesis may have some English validity but no Scottish application’.
Far from it. But there are variations in the Scottish application. We too have our literary radicals but some of them were mere ranters when they turned to politics. Hugh MacDiarmid was a fine poet but no-one on the right, or even the moderate left, is likely to be impressed, far less influenced, by his political eccentricities. Lewis Grassic Gibbon was a notable novelist in spite of his politics, not because of them.
If I remember various people on the Scottish left or from the nationalist movement with thanksgiving it’s not through the continuing influence of their political writing, if any, but for their personal qualities or sometimes their work outside politics. It would be a flint-hearted Tory who failed to see the worth of the old breed of Scots Labour people like Jean Mann or Willie Ross or some of the pre-Salmondite Scot Nats.
I was charmed by Douglas Young, both as a host and as author of a delightful book combining travel-writing and classical scholarship. I was sorry that my old university friend Jimmy Halliday, who rose to the top of the SNP when it was still struggling, faded from view once it made progress. I never lost my admiration for Neil MacCormick, though I didn’t understood why he took his nationalism so far beyond the post-war ‘Covenant’ formula of his father, the ‘King John’ of Glasgow University legend and the pre-war SNP.
But having friends on the other side isn’t the same thing as coming under their influence. The great Scottish evidence of the benefits of listening to the other side, even having one’s ideas refined or rearranged in response to its thinking or its art, comes from our two literary Titans, both of them dabblers in politics and applied theology. Scott and Burns not only shaped the world’s perception of Scotland but shaped, and sometimes re-shaped, Scotland’s perception of itself. Contemporary Scotland probably praises them more than it reads them, even in Burns’s case, but doesn’t realise that they created much that we take for granted.
Neither made much impact on our politics but both shaped our sense of nationality. The radical Burns failed to keep pace with the viciously twisting turns of the French Revolution and ended up giving his comrades in the Dumfries Volunteers the patriotic verse that Michael Forsyth recites with gusto. We would not remember Scott’s robust Tory politics if we did not encounter them as part of a life that made the most influential of all Scottish contributions to European cultural history.
Scott’s reshaping of Scotland’s view of itself, though sometimes criticised, is now well recognised. He not only romanticised the Highlands for the benefit of the English and foreigners but for the lowland Scots, and let a nation of Whigs play at being Cavaliers and even Jacobites. (To recognise some of the literary and cultural consequences of Scott read that fitful Presbyterian R L Stevenson and that devoted son of the manse, John Buchan.)
In today’s jargon, he taught that recognition of cultural diversity can, in the right conditions, help to create national unity and not to endanger it. And in the days when Scotland prided itself on its literacy, and even poor people valued books, he enriched the lives of those who would never share his politics.
So too did Burns, though his legacy is more involved in the diversity of human experience and contradictions of human nature than with the romanticisation of Scottish history. We now take it for granted that Scots could take Burns to their heart and, quite literally, set him on pedestals from Ayr and Leith to the London Embankment and far beyond. I certainly took that for granted until one January I put the Nasmyth portrait on the cover of ‘Life and Work’ and, despite general approval, got letters denouncing glorification of this braggart, drunken, fornicator. (I think there was an additional and clearly groundless charge of Godlessness.) Only then, amid these echoes of an older Scottish mood, did I realise how remarkable it was that the Scotland which anointed Burns as national bard and hero was the one in which the greatest force in popular culture was the Evangelical revival and the dominant intellects of the day those of Thomas Chalmers and that other zealous Christian, James Clerk Maxwell, who is said to have sung Burns songs with a guitar.
Burns did not just play a part, along with Scott, in the reconciliation of the Covenanting and Cavalier traditions and in persuading lowlanders that the Highlands were part of civilisation. He allowed Scotland to temper the emphasis on order, intellect, virtue, and sound doctrine which had shaped the national character so well with a recognition of emotions, sometimes emotional weaknesses and follies, as inescapable elements of human nature and therefore human society.
These great Scots are not just witnesses to the profitability of listening to what is being said by the other side. Like Jaroslav Hasek and his ‘good soldier’ they show how enjoyable it can be. But they also remind us that the confrontation of opposites, though a necessary part of decision-making in elections, referendums, and second-reading debates, is a means of settling some matter in hand and not of establishing ultimate truths.
R D Kernohan is a writer and broadcaster
website design by Big Blue Dogwebsite development by NSD Web