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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
February 24, 2002
Ye Scots
Confined recently to nights in a hotel room in a foreign city I had the luck to find the most exhilarating piece of popular history I had read in a long time. The book is How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It -- a title which doubles as a summary. It is the latest by Arthur Herman an American who is establishing a niche for himself as a gutsy revisionist and prime mover of the Western Heritage Programme within the Smithsonian in Washington DC. His book is "Scotch" as we would say in Canada by which we mean solid and not kidding. (Well a little droll but so is single malt.) The book unfolds the Scottish Enlightenment of the 18th century for the intelligent general reader (that would be you as I imagine) -- which for all its significance to the world we now inhabit is little studied or appreciated. It is almost the opposite of intellectually sexy all achievement and no tragic pause. For the truth is wherever you look into "modernity" you find Scottish antecedents. From 1745 on they were Scots who altered our whole view of education and law who invented our modern economics and social studies; our medicine and engineering too; who shook down conceited practices in everything from history to theology -- in each turning an inherited essentially mediaeval amalgam of prejudice and guesswork into a systematic study whose new focus would be the welfare of mankind. The paradox is that this achievement was made in a thinly-populated country that had lost its political independence in the Act of Union of 1707 and which was a squalid backwater removed from the elegant royal courts of Europe; a land which had been scoured clean of even its pretty churches by a humourless Presbyterian kirk and brutish Highland raiders suggestive of Afghanistan's Taliban and warlords. A large part of the secret however was in Scotland's madrasas -- the fanatic Presbyterian insistence on universal education and the democratic spirit that emerged from its levelling of lairds and bishops. Scotland became host to the "frontier spirit" and the "self-made man". And praise the Lord. For there is an alternative modernism that descends chiefly from the French Enlightenment of the same 18th century another brilliant epoch but one which in its Cartesian rationalism and guillotine dualism lies behind the Reign of Terror Napoleon Bolshevism ultimately the killing fields of Stalin and Pol Pot. (To say nothing of the metric system.) It is with us today in "political correctness" and has dogged us through one after another chic intellectual trend from the salons of Paris to the little Left Banks in every other city. And when we say that we -- at least those of us blessed to live under the several English-language constitutions -- derive our idea of liberty from Rousseau and Voltaire we are making a false pose. We get what we are instead from Glasgow and Adam Smith. We are that "petit bourgeois" which the French so bemoan. But to begin to understand the remarkable intellectual movement that flowered in Adam Smith -- and Frances Hutcheson Lord Kames (Henry Home) Adam Ferguson William Robertson Thomas Reid Dugald Stewart David Hume and the other gods who stride these pages -- we must humbly revisit their environment and times. The book is in two parts Epiphany and "Diaspora". The first tells the story of the gathering and fruition of that Scottish Enlightenment stippling its central ideas against an anecdotal background. The second narrates the working through of those ideas by Scotsmen native and emigrant descended or in spirit through the 19th century and to the eve of the Great War -- through the building of the United States and beyond the uttermost ends of the British Empire. I should have been happier had the author stretched the first half to twice the size and confined the second to a brief lyrical envoi. For the second part of the story tells itself once the first is properly comprehended. Take one example and be done with it. Sir Walter Scott whose Ivanhoe was jammed down my eyes as a boy is a huge figure in the literature of Europe as one might realize in the poet of Schubert's "Ave Maria". More than the principal architect of Romanticism (which he built from the foundation stone of Macpherson's Ossian) he invented the modern genre of the historical novel and with that the novel of fact -- hence Flaubert Dostoevsky Musil Pynchon and the very possibility of Hollywood. Sir Walter was himself a product of the later Scottish Enlightenment -- what I think of as the Tory or redemptive phase consolidating an earlier Whiggish revolution in a kind of post-coital Jacobite sublimity. He is inconceivable without the Edinburgh that nurtured him born as he was in College Wynd a product of the city's High School and University; and heir to all the faeries. The Scots built Canada and many other things. They built a railway in India and the great freighters in Glasgow from James Watt's steam engines. From the integrated cotton mill to the blast furnace for steel Glaswegians were the millwrights and engineers of the Industrial Revolution. Edinburgh's school of medicine sent doctors like missionaries to the ends of the earth having devised modern surgery and obstetrics. Thomas Telford did the bridges and John McAdam laid the roads. Andrew Carnegie endowed and outfitted the whole idea of the modern public library. "Philanthropy" in its activist connotation is a Scottish word. Of that world-straddling British Empire it can be said with some exaggeration that the English were the soldiers but the Scotsmen were the brains. Of not one empire but two for the more one looks into the American Revolution the more clearly one sees the ideas enthralling the Founding Fathers are specifically those of the Scottish Enlightenment whose language they speak and not the French. America became Adam Smith's republic under Lord Kame's system of jurisprudence. As Smith himself said of the colonists From shopkeepers, tradesmen, and attornies, they are become statesmen and legislators. And to the present day America in both its secularity and its rather Calvinist religiosity has the Scottish flavour. The Scotland of bagpipes is pass?. That is a land of barbarism and chauvinism -- of Scottish nationalism and football hooliganism today. This instead is our better angel the Scotland of the mind. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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