The Seven Wonders of Scotland, introduced by Gerry Hassan, Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2012.

An impressive and stimulating anthology, Birlinn’s The Seven Wonders of Scotland gives us eight imaginations on future Scotland. Seven of those are gifted by: Andrew Crumley, Michael Gardiner, Gavin Inglis, Billy Letford, Maggie Mellon, Caroline Von Schmalansee, and Kirsti Wishart. Gerry Hassan contributes the eighth by way of his extensive and provocative introduction, ‘Scotland’s Stories: A Nation of Imaginations’. As a whole, the book presents vivid futures, not to rest on complacent and titillating speculations, far from it: The Seven Wonders of Scotland deploys serious doses of imagination to cause us to pause and reflect on what these affecting futures might ‘tell us about ourselves here and now’.
The very contemporary political context for this review has been thrown into relief by Nicola Sturgeon’s proclamation this week that independence is not about nationality and identity. Rather, we hear, it is about the practicalities of politics, about the levers of power to be deployed to ensure our arrival in Scotland at a better form of democracy and social justice. As pragmatic as I might think myself to be, I could not hear Sturgeon’s proposition clearly thanks to the coincident and challenging (and welcome) noise created by Hassan’s book. That interpolation is effected precisely because Birlinn’s stories invoke a here-and-now cultural identity which is, quite simply, and for better or for worse, recognisably ours: a layered cultural identity which cannot be peeled off the practice of politics in this the country of our formed identity as if some kind of self-adhesive label.
We know why Sturgeon (and others of course) tactically describes some distance between herself as advocate of independence and nationality & identity motivations for independence. This tactic is an insurance policy against accusations of (supposed) localism and parochialism, the worst form of which is (indeed) aprogressive conservative cultural nationalism: a pettiness which is a step towards contemporary fascism no less. ‘Sturgeon’s’ tactic creates the impression of a world of pure democracy and pure social justice which is in some way apart from the world of lived relations, especially the lived relations of a country of not quite five and a half million. But no such pure democracy or pure social justice exists, as all politicians know at that threshold moment when they meet candid reflexiveness about their professional endeavours.
Sturgeon’s semi-seductive pitch cannot erase the fact that all politics is properly pragmatic, and all forms of democracy and social justice within an independent Scotland will be intertwined with both our national needs, and, as Birlinn’s book and Hassan’s storymaking might propose, our understanding of our national needs. This is not to decry the possibility of universal appeal to democracy and social justice, but it is to decry the tactically wanted separateness of that thing from the actuality of its manifestation in locations and national cultures.
Hassan is well aware of that fact of inseparability. In answer to his own Introductory parrhetorical question, ‘What do our seven Scotlands tell us about this place, its people and its future?’, Hassan offers this acutely seen ambition: of a future Scotland, perhaps to be accelerated by the conditions of independence, we might well desire that:
A wider set of communal societal stories emerge which address the issues of mission and purpose that come from a powerful sense of ‘we’ and ‘us’; where we are more than a disparate group of individuals or groups but bound together by a sense of mutual obligation and understanding. And that in twenty-first century Scotland, new mobilising myths and perspectives emerge which resonate with our past and connect to a future.
Here Hassan allows the Existentialist dimension of the independence debate to come to the fore, and quite rightly according to this reader. Coincidentally, or maybe not, Brian Wilson, writing in today’s Scotsman (Beware the SNP’s hidden Ex-factor‘, Wednesday 5th December 2012) finds fault with Sturgeon for not acknowledging the Existentialist aspect of the independence debate in her topical speech. Citing the late Sir Neil MacCormick, Wilson introduces the notion of ‘the existentialist and utilitarian strands’ of Scottish Nationalism, and chastises Sturgeon for not confirming her own existential inclinations towards Independence.

So, Wilson has Sturgeon up on a charge for masquerading as a Utilitarian when, in fact, her colours are that, he says, of an Existentialist. The bind for Sturgeon and her Existential Nationalists is, according to Wilson;
while ‘independence for better or for worse’ is their raison d’être, it has never shown much sign of commanding majority support within Scotland. So they require that third category which, I guess, covers the entire SNP leadership. They are ‘E-[Existentialist] Faction who must pose as U-[Utilitarian] Team in order to tempt the unwary with wonderful promises and disappearing problems…
Wilson sticks his plastic knife into Aunt Sally when he has it that ‘then comes the difficult bit – persuading the electorate that this [the pursuit of democracy and social justice] is a meaningful prospectus, rather than a barrowload of platitudes to give cover to her fundamentalist ambition’. In this context, then, Wilson conjoins Sturgeon’s disavowed existentialism with a fundamentalism which is blind through mania to the noble meta-story of Wilson’s thinly veiled highbutcannotbeseentobehigh-ground of politics, namely, a utilitarian worthyworkerist busyness, to be performed, at best, with a lobotomised sub-ideology which would sanction the stealing of the lunch voucher from that all-too-human political Existentialist playground weakling as she herself stole five minutes of contemplation of existential stories. By the way Brian and Nicola, an Existentialist Nationalist is not by definition a Fundamentalist: give the voucher back.
The problem with Wilson’s argument for me is that in pursuit of Irx-Factor journoism he has to be not-honest about the Existential drivers which underpin his own understanding of what politics means and what politics is for, not just anywhere, but here, in Scotland, amidst his own stories, personal and political, and those of his family, friends and respected colleagues. For Wilson’s argument to work, paradoxically, his political conviction must have been born from a familial and collegial inculcation, not of stories of the ethics and the ethical characters of Scottish Labour and Scottish futures, but of the antiseptic ambitions of pure democracy and technocratic, abstract social justice. I will sign up to Brian Wilson’s anti-Existential Irx-Factor factoring when he can renounce the stories and shared understandings which contributed deeply and lastingly to his formation as professional (utilitarian) politician and committed and generous public thinker.
It is not, then, reasonable to assume that a so-called Existential Nationalism cannot be connected to a Utilitarian Nationalism, and on this point I don’t so much find fault with Wilson’s unwillingness to say as much, I find fault with Sturgeon’s unwillingness to connect nationality and identity to the particular kind of Utilitarian Nationalism that would befit the communal and lived stories of Scotland as a nation and putative state. On this point, it seems to me, Hassan’s public discourse has a lot to offer the Nationalist strategists, even the Existential ones, and it would be disingenuous of Wilson to disavow his own cultural and political stories and imaginings only to pretend to say that there cannot be any connection between Existentialist and Utilitarianist political positions.
Now, you will need to read Hassan’s book for yourself, but my neglect of its composite stories here (for the time being) goes some way to represent the point, only semi-deliberately I confess, that one cannot easily separate the discrete, bound and published stories from the background|foreground stories of one’s lived world. And it happens to be those stories, as you can tell, which put me in mind to say that the utilitarian politics which are indirectly and directly referenced in The Seven Wonders of Scotland are the necessary outcomes of existentialist imagining, an existentialist imagining which is no more fundamentalist than Wilson’s ingrained existential stories of comradeship and solidarity.
Lastly, thinking again of our current (in this case only semi-contingent) coincident stories, what irony is there in the fact that in the same week as Sturgeon relegates nationality and identity we see the public strife of Creative Scotland, a national body, we all hoped, that would be an engine to drive our communal, Existentialist, creative stories of location-inflected selves for aesthetic and for utilitarian gain.
I’m not as eloquant as Brian Wilson, but I addressed the speech thusly (in a letter to the Herald which they didn’t publish)
“You report (Sturgeon urges voters to put focus on society, 3rd December) that Nicola Sturgeon’s conviction that Scotland should be independent “…stems from the principles not of identity or nationality but democracy and social justice.” That’s funny, because I’ve been locked in debate with Ms Sturgeon’s party all my adult life and all I’ve ever seen, until now, is the politics of identity and nationality. Last week’s decision by Alex Salmond to assert Scottish exceptionalism on the Leveson/press process is just the latest in an endless line of identity based policies, tactics and slogans from the SNP. It’s a bit late to attempt to change that now, is it not?
I would suggest that, if Nicola Sturgeon really wants democracy and social justice, she should join the Labour Party. We may not be perfect, but it’s a lot better strategy than breaking up the country on the off-chance that the pieces will fall where she apparently seems to want them: a position that, as far as I can see, stems more from blind faith than any rationally calculated conviction.”
Makes sense to me.
oops, just noticed it should be eloquent…
We hear from Labour that the SNPs nationalism is wicked, evil even, selfish, parochial, fascists, narrow minded, isolationists, right wing, dictatorial, racist, anti English, and now in an effort to impress and confuse, as unionist ghostie stories are now subject to the laws of diminishing returns, and boy are Labours diminished, we have “existentialist and utilitarian strands.” So that would be “A philosophy that emphasizes the uniqueness and isolation of the individual experience in a hostile or indifferent universe, regards human existence as unexplainable, and stresses freedom of choice and responsibility for the consequences of one’s acts.” along with,
” the view that the morally right action is the action that produces the most good.” Obviously the attack dog Wilson has now been tasked with raising the intellectual bar on the debate, in doing so they hope that their use of big 20th century trendy phrases and ideology will so impress Shuggie the welder that he will nod sagely in to his Scotsman and conclude that the only was is union when it comes to the referendum vote that we were never going to get as we did not have the legal right to do so. The bigger the lie the bigger the words.
This oft repeated mantra that only 20, 25, 28, 29, 30% of Scots want to be independent has all the hallmarks of fear and desperation, hysteria even as the day looms ever nearer. Those whose very existence utterly depend on Westminster spin faster and faster like whirling dervishes as they try so hard to stamp out the fire of Scottish independence. Despite the flames licking round their ankles. Wilson is the hard nasty face of unionism, twisted and ugly with hate and bitterness verging on sectarianism, the kind we see that builds walls in Belfast and Jerusalem, and that recently has boiled over once more in both places. That is the separation and tribalism caused by en forced identity that Britain espouses for us. Blood soaked and evil. And precisely the kind that the SNP are so commendably well clear of. But in their mantras British nationalism is good, Scottish nationalism is evil.
I have a very clear memory of the very same mantras being paraded pre the devolution referendum, in 1997, Labour having stolen the 1979 vote for devolution by using one of their English constituency MPs to make special rules for Scotland using the votes of dead people. However they did not have the balls to do it again in 1997, and the vote for was carried. The wailing and screeching from Labour and their Tory shadows pre 97 were pathetic and painful to listen to, Brian Wilson being the most vocal. Oh how Scotland was going to suffer if we took this terrible step, oh how we would be scorned and shunned internationally, we would be the new North Korea or Bangladesh according to Robertson. The same tired old scripts were rolled out once more pre 2007 when the SNP looked like taking power and did, then again in 2011 when they consolidated that power when Scotland gave them the mandate they sought to have the much denied referendum on Scottish independence. The laws of diminishing returns kicked the unionists hard in the crotch as they went down with all hands. And now as that yearned for day draws ever closer these scripts and mantras are being refreshed and regurgitated, Lord West, Michael Moore, Lord Foulkes, Comical Ali Darling, Lord Wallace, Lord Forsyth, a never ending list of Westminster gravy train riders take it in turns to throw the compliant unionist press pack their daily diet of bones of scary awful things that will befall Scotland. They even shrank an independence march of near 12000 people in Edinburgh down to less than 5000 so terrified are they. And just the other day lied disgracefully about a letter from the EU to the lords that did not exist. Credibility not one ounce.
Ah so only comments allowed are those of Labours luvvies understood, fear is a great motivator.