Daughter of Hell's blog: "Haggis, Tatties & Neeps"

A while back I tried to organise a conference and as I am English and live in Scotland I had no idea of how Scottish history changed things, anyway i found it interesting. The Scottish Enlightenment Scotland's connection to England began officially in 1603, when King James VI of Scotland inherited the English crown and became also King James I of England. The kingdoms were still theoretically distinct, both crowns just happened to sit on the same head. This remained the case until the 1707 Act of Union, which united the kingdoms of England and Scotland forever. Before 1707, there had been surprisingly little contact or even less good feeling between the two nations. All Scotsmen were either Presbyterians or Jacobites, and that alone was enough to alienate them from four-fifths of the English population. Few Scotsmen traveled south and even fewer Englishmen traveled north. Scotland's traditional ally, France, was England's traditional enemy. Scottish scholars and clergymen looked to the universities and seminaries of Continental Europe, rather than England, to further their educations and garner intellectual inspiration. The internal structure of Scotland looked nothing like England. The Edinburgh parliament was an incredibly corrupt and unrepresentative institution dominated by "gangs" of noblemen. The interlocking system of assemblies of elders of the inquisitorial Presbyterian Kirk of Scotland served as the only real local government Scotland had. Scottish agriculture was semi-feudal and unproductive, run via the "run-rig" system in unenclosed fields with peculiarly short tenancies. On the upside, compared to their English counterparts, the Scottish lords were decidedly more paternalistic and their lifestyle and culture much closer to that of their tenants -- which did wonders for social relations. And then, of course, there were the mysterious and impenetrable Highlands, run by the "barbarous" Clans, whose social, cultural, political and economic structures were a thousand years older than anything else in Britain. Before 1707, economic interaction between the two nations was virtually nil, even on the borderlands (where the degree of animosity between the populations was perhaps the greatest). English Mercantilist policies ensured that Scots were barred access to the English colonies. Scotland's own commerce with England hampered by prohibitive trade barriers. Scottish commercial cities -- which, almost always, just meant Glasgow -- were little more than provincial entrepôts. Scotland's attempts to muscle in on colonial commerce started -- and ended -- with the ill-fated "Darien scheme" to set up a Scottish colony in Central America in 1698-1702. The 1707 Act of Union did not change all this overnight. The marriage was a painful one that took over a century to work itself through. At least three bloody Jacobite rebellions -- in 1690, 1715 and 1745 -- rocked Scotland to its very foundations. In the aftermath, the Scottish nobility lost their remaining feudal powers and the Highlands were conquered and subdued. The Kirk barely withstood the strain of their new episcopalian relations, and eventually broke apart in a schism. The main worry of 18th Century Scots was how the poor, backward and stagnant Scotland would fare when thrown into a common market and destiny with England's world-class dynamic economy. The Glasgow merchants welcomed the lifting of trade barriers and access to colonies (they were quick to hone in on the tobacco trade), but they also realized that they had nowhere near the experience, financing and political clout of their English competitors. As the agricultural and industrial revolutions advanced in England, the Scottish gentry and peasantry alike wondered nervously about how much time they had left before English-style capitalism transformed the Scottish countryside into "factories of corn and beef". Would Scotland become prosperous like England, or would it descend into dependent pauperism like Ireland? And how would the new self-seeking capitalist ethos bode on the stern morals and traditional values of the Scottish people? These questions were foremost on the minds of the Scottish philosophers of the 18th Century. As so many times before, they looked to their French counterparts for answers. France was then enjoying its age of Enlightenment and, quickly enough, the intellectual fire spread to Scotland. Although sharing the French speculative-rationalist spirit, the work of the Scottish philosophers was tempered with doses of severe skepticism and a more pronounced form of utilitarianism. Also, unlike the French, the Scottish thinkers were particularly concerned with economic growth and development, the consequences of international trade and the mechanics of an emerging urban, commercial, bourgeois society -- concerns reflecting the reality of post-1707 Scotland. The "Scottish Enlightenment" stretched roughly from 1740 to 1790. Unlike in France, many of its protagonists were academics. Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith, Thomas Reid and John Millar were professors at the University of Glasgow. Adam Ferguson, Dugald Stewart and William Robertson were at the University of Edinburgh. The universities of Aberdeen and St. Andrews were dominated by their students. But there were also some important figures outside the academy who influenced the course of the dialogue, including Lord Kames, Sir James Steuart, Dr. James Anderson and, above everybody else, the towering figure of David Hume. The three major areas of concern for Scottish philosophers were moral philosophy, history and economics. In all three, David Hume blazed the way, with the other Scottish philosophers following him in support or in criticism. In moral philosophy, the main question was whether the acquisitive ethics of capitalism could be made compatible with traditional virtues of sociability, sympathy and justice. The issue had been provoked by Bernard de Mandeville in his famous thesis that "private vices" lead to substantial "public benefits", whereas virtuous behavior does very little good at all. The Scottish philosophers wanted to show that the choice between private virtue and public good was a false one. The scandalous resolution forwarded by David Hume (1739-40) was that moral values and judgments were social constructions anyway. Anything that is pleasurable, Hume argued, people will judge "virtuous" and anything that is painful, they will call "vice". Consequently, we need not worry about the corruption of morals by capitalism. Private moral judgments will evolve with it. Hume's hedonistic solution was turned upside down by Francis Hutcheson (1725, 1755), who argued that virtue yields pleasure because it conforms to our natural and innate "moral sense", while vice yields pain because it is unnatural. As a result, Hutcheson came up with the utilitarian ethical precepts that the height of virtue was achieving the "greatest good for the greatest number". Adam Smith (1759) attempted to reconcile the Hume and Hutcheson positions via the artifice of "natural sympathy" and the "impartial spectator". In history, the Scots had a tendency to come with meta-sociological accounts of the "natural progress" of civilization. This "natural history" or "conjectural history" approach was initiated by David Hume (1757). Conjectural history took a distinct "stages" form in the hands of Adam Ferguson (1767), John Millar (1771) and Adam Smith (1776) . Smith, for instance, envisaged history as progressing through four economic stages, attended by political and social structures: a hunting and gathering stage, a pastoral and nomadic stage, a agricultural and feudalist stage and the final commerce and manufacturing stage (which Scotland was now entering). Like Ferguson, Smith placed division of labor and the expansion of commerce as the fundamental driver of history. The efforts of the Scottish school led Voltaire to note that "we look to Scotland for all our ideas of civilization". A decidedly different form of history -- the "narrative" history -- was also pursued by the Scottish scholars. In this, David Hume (who else?) led the way with his controversial History of England (1754-1762). With varying degrees of success, great narrative histories were also advanced by other Scottish scholars, such as Robertson (1759, 1769) and Ferguson (1783). This historical style was taken up in England by Edward Gibbon in his famous 1776 account of the fall of Rome. On political economy, David Hume (1752) initiated a different approach. Instead of embedding economics in a social and historical context, as he had morals and religion, Hume decided instead to let the laws of economics stand on their own, externally and eternally. Rejecting both the Mercantilist doctrines which fetishized money and the French approach which emphasized the primacy of agriculture, Hume identified commerce as the main engine of economic growth, with jealousy of trade and the misuse of money and credit as its main obstacles. Ferguson's (1767) division of labor added another dimension. Against Hume, Robert Wallace (1758) and Sir James Steuart (1767) attempted to revive the Mercantilist orthodoxy (albeit in more liberal dress). But Steuart's work, in turn, provoked the great thesis of Adam Smith -- The Wealth of Nations (1776) -- which placed industry and manufacturing in the position of honor. Although the achievements of the Scottish scholars were toasted in France, they did not have an immediate impact south of the border. While their northern cousins were asking hard questions about mankind, English intellectuals wallowed in the shallow self-congratulations of the barren age of Dr. Johnson (the great exception, again, was Edward Gibbon). As Hume asked Smith, shortly before the latter published an English edition of his work, "How can you so much as entertain a thought of publishing a Book, full of Reason, Sense, and Learning, to those wicked, abandoned Madmen?" The Scottish Enlightenment came to an end in the early 1800s, due largely to the rise of Christian pietism in Scotland. Radical Presbyterian clergymen and Tory politicians, disgruntled at the "refined paganism" and Whiggish tone of the Scottish philosophers, eventually gained control of the Scottish academies and universities and reorganized the appointments and curricula in favor of more conservative and religious-minded academics. Both James Mill and J.R. McCulloch, the leaders of the Classical Ricardian School in the early 19th Century, were trained in the Scottish Enlightenment tradition, but, with academia now closed to their ilk, they had to look elsewhere for a perch to continue its work.

Scotland’s spiritual wealth Chris Thomson looks at contemporary Scotland and concludes that modernism is failing us There is a scene in the film Dances with Wolves where the Lakota are discussing the threat posed by white people. The tribe’s holy man, Kicking Bird, captures the mood of the meeting when he says “The whites are a poor people, but there are too many of them”. When he says “poor”, he does not mean they lack money or material things. He means they are spiritually poor. Of course, that was just a film. Yet the fact is that devious means, modern weapons and superior numbers were used to overcome the indigenous people of North America. That brought disaster to the tribes. Out went the health, dignity and ecological living that were relatively common before then. It is surely no accident that, once they had been overcome by the whites, alcoholism, obesity, addiction, depression, crime and suicide became widespread. The experience of the North American tribes has a lot to teach us. If Kicking Bird was here today, he would note that poor health, unhappiness and the absence of dignity and ecology are all too common, and he would not be surprised to see that alcoholism, obesity, drugs, depression, crime and addiction have taken hold in many communities. However, unlike many of us, he would probably attribute this to spiritual poverty. While it is true that material deprivation may be the cause of some problems in some communities in Scotland, it is worth noting that the tribes were at their happiest, healthiest and most ecological when they were materially poorer than everyone in the Scotland today. The implications of this for Scotland are immense, for it suggests that money and material things alone are unlikely to solve our problems. Indeed, there are many in Scotland who believe that the relentless pursuit of money, property and things may be a major cause of our problems, and that the solutions lie instead in replacing spiritual poverty with spiritual wealth. This is a very complex issue, but a useful point of departure is to examine the nature of modernity, because it was modernity, in practice, that defeated the tribes and ushered in their problems. Modernity is the set of values, beliefs and practices that have shaped the modern world. It has its roots in the worldview of modern science. At the heart of this worldview are some apparently harmless beliefs; “The universe and everything in it, ourselves included, is physical”; “The universe and everything in it is essentially a machine…a very sophisticated machine, but a machine nonetheless. For science, there can be nothing beyond this, such as God.”; “The universe has no intrinsic meaning or purpose”. Science has become so influential that all metaphysical, religious and philosophical claims that contradict it must be rejected. Yet if, as science insists, the universe began suddenly for no reason (the ‘Big Bang’), and life on this planet emerged by chance, then the world that science wants us to believe in must be totally meaningless. The fact that this statement, as part of that world, must also be meaningless is little consolation! In any event, a life without meaning is a bleak life indeed. Many people today are desperately searching for deeper meaning, which no doubt explains the popularity of The Da Vinci Code. There is little doubt in my mind that one of the characteristics of modernity and modern society is loss of deeper meaning. The modern world is also suffering from loss of wisdom. If science rejects the accumulated wisdom of the ages in favour of its own empirically derived body of knowledge, then, since science is the dominant form of knowledge today, wisdom is effectively devalued. Perhaps we should not be surprised that we have become the most dangerous and destructive form of life on the planet. Nor should we be surprised that older people, who in non-modern societies are the respected wise elders, have been pushed to the margins in Scotland, many of them right out of sight into care homes. A wise society values its elders and the group. A modern society produces the cult of the young and the individual. In a wise society, the stock of wisdom increases because wisdom is valued. People wise up. It seems that modern societies have a tendency to dumb down. The modern world is also characterised by loss of ecology. Non-modern societies know just how important it is to live in harmony with each other and with the planet. How many of us can put our hands on our hearts and say that we truly live in harmony with each other, let alone the planet? The modern world has made many of us anxious and insecure. It is little wonder that we engage in frenetic activity, such as work, shopping and travelling, when we should be finding ways to live gently and simply, with ourselves and with the world around us. When taken together, loss of meaning, loss of wisdom and loss of ecology may be one of the main reasons that we now live in an era of unprecedented materialism. For many people, acquiring and consuming material things must seem like the only thing left for them to do. Our economics, our politics, our education, our healthcare and our culture have become steeped in material values and beliefs and the behaviours that flow from these. We are paying a high price for this, as we exploit and damage each other and the world. It is short step from materialism and loss of wisdom to economism. Economism is the tendency to view the world through the lens of economics, to regard a country as an economy rather than as a society, and to believe that economic considerations and values rank higher than other ones. Economism is clearly evident throughout Scotland and is a strong influence in Scottish political circles. It is reflected in the growth ethic of the business world and in the widespread belief that happiness is to be found through money and possessions. It is significant that non-modern societies regard economics as a means to an end, whereas modern societies have made economics the end itself, in the sense that perpetual economic growth seems to be the central purpose of most countries today. If the Partnership Agreement (between Labour and Lib-Dems) is anything to go by, it is certainly one of Scotland’s central purposes. By marginalising wisdom, deeper meaning and ecology, we have unwittingly created a spiritual vacuum. Many people in Scotland probably feel this at some level. They feel that something big is missing from their lives. They may not be able to put this into words, but they feel a vacuum inside them that cries out to be filled. They experience this vacuum as anxiety, discomfort, fear, insecurity, despair, or a sense of pointlessness. Understandably, they try to fill the emptiness, and they do this in a huge variety of ways. They overeat, they overshop, they overindulge, they watch a lot of television, they engage in a lot of activity (no surprise that being busy is regarded as a virtue today), or they use sex, drugs and alcohol as pain-killers. These behaviours, unhealthy in themselves, often lead to other forms of ill health, such as alcoholism, obesity, addiction, depression and suicide, as well as the health problems that follow from these, such as diabetes and heart disease. Health professionals in Scotland will recognise this picture. But so long as there is a spiritual vacuum, people will continue to behave in these ways. Telling people to live healthy lifestyles will not change things, so long as the greater influence in society is economic growth and endless consumption. So, if modernity is indeed the main root cause of the spiritual poverty that is widespread in Scotland and across the world, what can we do about it? What can we do to reverse the downward drift into even more materialism and further loss of wisdom and meaning? There is no single, easy answer to this. However, I do think that it is possible to outline a few of the general conditions that will favour the emergence of spiritual wealth in Scotland. • Bringer back Older People. Older people have been pushed to the margins in Scotland while the young occupy centre stage. Many TV programmes, for example, give us the impression that older people have been airbrushed out of existence. Far from being seen as our main source of wisdom, older people are often portrayed as a burden on society or merely as a market for retirement services. Is it any wonder that so many of them feel unvalued and isolated? It has become a self-fulfilling prophecy that as one gets older, one gets less healthy, more dependent, and less valuable. The fact that so much potential wisdom is being lost as older people are marginalised is one of the tragedies of our times. We could, if we wished, enable the re-emergence of a vast amount of wisdom simply by raising the status and value of older people. That alone would have a profound effect on Scotland. • Bring Back Education. Although we continue to use the word ‘education’ to describe what happens in schools, colleges and universities, there is not much true education around these days in Scotland. True education is about bringing out the best and uniqueness in each individual, even if that means they end up questioning and opposing prevailing beliefs, values and behaviours. To a large extent, education has been replaced by its opposite, schooling – which is the process of shaping people to believe and follow prevailing beliefs, values and behaviours. There are, of course, some notable exceptions, but these are the exceptions that prove the rule. Education allows wisdom and meaning to emerge. Schooling acts against this. When schooling is combined with economism, ‘education’ ends up being little more than a training in how to perform well in the economy. In some places it has gone even further than this - young children are being encouraged to become ‘entrepreneurs’! It is time we allowed children to have a childhood, and it is time we replaced schooling with education • Bring back Self-reliance. One of the hallmarks of modern societies is their dependency on business, government and experts for goods, services and knowledge that, in many cases, individuals and communities would be better providing for themselves. As a rule of thumb, dependency is unhealthy and self-reliance is healthy. The Lakota and other tribes were self-reliant, empowered communities. They were living cultures, who could do everything for themselves, rather than vicarious cultures, who depend on others for most of their needs. They recognised the central importance of basic human capacities, such as caring, growing their own food, cooking, healing, educating, creating, and entertaining, and would not dream of having these things provided as commodities and services by government and big business. Wisdom and meaning arise naturally out of self-reliance. Insofar as Scotland is a society that is very dependent on business, government and experts for the basics of living, it is a society that inhibits wisdom and meaning. One of the ways of enabling wisdom and meaning is to encourage as much self-reliance as possible. I am acutely aware that I have covered a lot of ground at some speed. Inevitably, I have been unable to go into much detail. My intention at this stage is simply to draw attention to the fact that modernity is not a health-producing or happiness-producing culture and that the prevalence of modernity and its policy counterpart, modernising, is holding Scotland back and preventing us from becoming the great country we could be. Modernity and modernising marginalise wisdom, meaning and ecology and they lead to spiritual poverty. If we are ever to solve Scotland’s problems, we have to replace spiritual poverty with spiritual wealth. This means many things, but ultimately it means allowing wisdom, deeper meaning and ecology to take centre stage in our private and public lives. Chris Thomson is Director of Central Purpose

Restoring wisdom Chris Thomson asks whether Scotland is making real progress Is Scotland making progress? Well, it all depends what we mean by ‘progress’. Many will assume that if the economy is growing, we are making progress. Others will understand progress in terms of how healthy, educated, socially just and environmentally friendly Scotland is. There is a third understanding of progress, well off the radar screen of public debate in Scotland. Before revealing what it is, let us examine the other two. There is nothing intrinsically desirable about economic growth. It simply means that more money was spent this year on goods and services than was spent last year. It does not tell us anything about the desirability or quality of these additional goods and services. It does not tell us anything about the human, social and environmental costs of providing them. It does not tell us anything about income and wealth distribution. And it does not tell us whether we are happier and healthier. The main national economic indicator, GDP, treats the good, the bad and the ugly as if they were all good. If there is more crime to be dealt with, more divorces to be sorted out, more pollution to be cleaned up, and more illness to be treated, then all of this counts towards economic growth. GDP gives us the impression that things are going well when they may be going badly. There are several good alternative indicators. Among the best known are the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) and the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW). Unlike GDP, they subtract the costs of economic growth from the benefits, to give us a truer picture of progress. It is significant that while GDP in many developed countries has been rising more or less consistently in the last 50 years, ISEW and GPI have been tailing off since the late Seventies. While it is true that economic growth lifts the very poor out of abject poverty, there comes a point in the development of every economy when economic growth becomes counterproductive, and produces more problems than it solves. The advocates of growth tell us that if the economy is not growing, we have ‘stagnation’, and that if it is declining, we have ‘recession’. Yet surely there is nothing wrong with a society that is not consuming excessively and that actually chooses to spend less money on some types of goods and services. Imagine a Scotland where people walk and cycle more, where less money spent on divorce and crime, and where people take more care of their health and need less medical treatment. There would be less spending overall, but this would mean less growth and that would be taken to mean that we were doing badly. The other main pillar of the growth argument is that we need economic growth in order to eradicate poverty, unemployment, injustice, disease and crime. In fact, there is much evidence that the opposite is true. The *pursuit* of growth may be at the root of much ill health, crime, social breakdown, inequality, and environmental degradation, since it keeps putting increasing pressure on people and nature. Using economic growth to try to solve problems is like trying to put out a fire by throwing petrol on it. What aboutother progress? Is Scotland really healthier, better educated, more socially just and more environmentally friendly? Scotland is not healthier. We have some of the worst health statistics in the developed world, but it is widely believed that many health problems can be reduced by addressing poverty, deprivation and inequalities. Although this may be true in extreme cases, it is questionable as a general proposition. Just as economic growth becomes counterproductive afer a certain stage of economic development, trying to cure health problems with economic growth could prove just as counterproductive, particularly if these problems have some of their roots not in poverty, but in materialism, overindulgence and the stresses caused by the pressures to work harder and consume even more. Although New Labour has reduced the number of people living below the poverty line and looks likely to meet its target of reducing child poverty by 25 per cent, it has failed to close the gap between rich and poor. In fact, inequality has increased every year in the last eight. The standard response is to claim that, although inequality is undesirable, what really matters is ‘equality of opportunity’. This might be true if money did not continue to buy so much advantage, in healthcare, education, and in many other ways. The reality is that social mobility is not improving and that current public service reform initiatives will simply reproduce in the public sector the advantages already enjoyed by the better off in the marketplace. Scotland may actually be less socially just than it was 10 years ago. As for the environment, it is significant that ‘sustainable development’ has come to mean ‘economic growth as usual, while trying to do less damage to the natural environment’. That is neither sustainable nor is it genuine development. There is an urgent need to redefine sustainable development to include health and the fabric of society, in addition to the natural environment, because these are just as threatened as the natural environment. A word about the role of business. Business could, if it wished, play a major role in the shift from away from the economic growth agenda towards the sustainable development agenda. After all, business has a powerful vested interest in the sustainability of health, society and planet. Without these, there would simply be no business. However, business is unlikely to be able to embrace sustainable development until it abandons its attachment to the organisational equivalent of economic growth, i.e. the drive for profit maximisation and the drive to make the company bigger. That, in turn, is unlikely to change until the law changes. As company law stands, directors of companies are under a duty to maximise shareholder return, which is interpreted as maximising profits. The law does not impose a duty on directors to ensure that the activities of their companies enhance people, society and the planet. The CSR (corporate social responsibility) movement attempts to redress the balance, but it is swamped by the huge pressure for economic growth and profits. The law should be changed. Adopting a wider understanding of sustainable development that includes the sustainability of health and society as well as the natural environment would be a big step in the right direction, but it might not be sufficient in the longer term to get to the roots of our problems. To do that, we may need to adopt a very different approach, which may seem strange and unfamiliar. For an example of what I mean, let us look at the Lakota in North America. We used to call them the Sioux. It is now generally accepted that the Lakota – and many other tribes of the Americas – used to live relatively healthy, happy, sustainable lives. Perhaps they would still be living that way today if they had not encountered modernity, in the form of the United States. That encounter, about 130 years ago, changed everything for the Lakota. It forced them to give up their healthy, happy, sustainable lives and to try to live modern lives instead. That proved to be catastrophic. Although it is true that modernity brought them cars, fridges and televisions, the tribes had to endure all the downside of modernity - poor health, addiction, dishonesty and crime, and wanton violence. But what exactly is this ‘modernity’ that proved so catastrophic for them? Modernity is the set of values, beliefs and behaviours that have shaped, and continue to shape, the modern world. They determine virtually everything we think, say and do. Arguably, modernity has its origins in the worldview of modern science. Science has become very powerful and influential. So much so that all metaphysical, religious and philosophical claims that contradict science must be rejected. And if, as science insists, the universe began suddenly for no reason, and life emerged by chance, then the whole show must be meaningless. The fact that this statement, as part of the universe, must also be meaningless is little consolation. A life without meaning is a bleak life indeed. For many people today, the search for meaning has become little more than a constant attempt to find quick gratification and to try to solve the endless problems that they are constantly creating. Modern societies are also characterised by loss of wisdom. If science rejects the accumulated wisdom of the ages in favour of its own empirically derived body of knowledge, then wisdom is devalued and no longer informs our lives in the ways that it still informs the lives of so-called ‘primitive’ peoples. The obsession in modern societies with evidence and empiricism means that we end up having to prove everything, even the blindingly obvious. In non-modern societies, people are content simply to know things without feeling that they have to prove them. Perhaps we should not be surprised that, with wisdom and meaning pushed to the margins of our lives, we have become the most dangerous and destructive form of life on the planet. Modernity is also characterised by materialism. We live in an era of rampant materialism. Too many of us give the highest priority to money and material things. Conversely, we give far too little priority to spiritual things. Our economics, our politics, our education, our healthcare and our culture are all strongly influenced by material values and beliefs. We are paying a high price for this. Why are we surprised that we exploit and damage each other and the world? It is because we do not care for things we do not value. It is a short step from materialism and loss of wisdom and meaning to economism and consumerism. Economism is the tendency to view the world through the lens of economics, to regard a country as an economy rather than as a society, and to believe that economic considerations and values are the most important ones. It is significant that in non-modern societies economics is a means to an end, whereas modern societies have made economics the end itself. Consumerism is the attempt to acquire happiness, fulfilment and identity through the acquisition and the possession of material things. Although people report that they get temporary satisfaction from shopping, they say it does not bring lasting happiness, and they need to do even more shopping to try to compensate for that. Consumerism is a dangerous downward spiral. By marginalising wisdom and removing deeper meaning from people’s lives, modernity has unwittingly created a spiritual vacuum. As a consequence, many people feel that something very big is missing from their lives. They experience this lack as anxiety, discomfort, fear, insecurity, or a sense of pointlessness. They try to compensate in all kinds of ways. They overeat, overconsume, engage in a lot of activity (no surprise that being busy is regarded as a virtue today), or they use sex and drugs as pain-killers. Modernity struck deep at the qualities that had enabled the Lakota to live relatively healthy, happy, sustainable lives - wisdom, deeper meaning, and spirituality. The Lakota’s problems were, until recently, identical to Scotland’s problems. The litany is all too familiar; obesity, alcoholism, addiction, depression and suicide, and crime. It significant that, while Scotland seems unable to solve her problems, the signs are that the Lakota are beginning to turn things round. Most significant, in my view, is the fact that the Lakota seem to be doing this not by using the moderniser’s solutions of service delivery and economic growth but instead by bringing wisdom, deeper meaning, and spirituality right back to the heart of their society. How they actually do this is beyond the scope of this article. This is entirely logical. If, as it seems, modernity strikes at wisdom, meaning and spirituality, and if loss of wisdom, meaning and spirituality is at the root of many of the problems of our times, then it makes eminent sense to do whatever it takes to bring wisdom, meaning and spirituality right back into the heart of public and private life. Doing this might well be a key that will unlock sustainable solutions to Scotland’s seemingly intractable problems. The implications of this are immense, for it suggests that money and material things are unlikely to solve our problems, and that current policies will therefore not work, except as short-term expedients. It suggests that the solutions lie instead in replacing spiritual poverty with ‘spiritual wealth’. However, even if enough people were persuaded that this is the way forward, how, in practice, would we restore wisdom, meaning and spirituality to a society that has marginalised these things for so long? If Scotland really wanted to become ‘the best small country in the world’ then it would put this question right at the very heart of its policy debates and public discussions. Chris Thomson is Director of Central Purpose

The Ideas Leaders Chris Thomson considers the potential and conditions needed for a new Scottish Enlightenment There was a time when Scotland led the world in some significant respects; shipbuilding, medicine, engineering and education immediately spring to mind. Without necessarily knowing it at the time, Scotland was a global thought leader. This took two forms – inventions and philosophy. For a long time, Scotland punched well above her weight in inventiveness. The list is long – television, telephone, refrigerator, microwave ovens, tarred roads, pneumatic tyres, golf, steam engine, radar, modern banks, antisepsis, antibiotics, quinine, fax machine, logarithms, iron bridges....the list just goes on. Few other countries can lay claim to such inventiveness. There must have been a reason, or reasons, for this extraordinary creativity. As if this were not enough, the philosophical foundations for modernism and for the market economy were also laid in Scotland, during the Scottish Enlightenment (roughly 1740-90). Many of the ideas emerging in Scotland during that heady period are now at the heart of most modern economies and at the heart of the programmes of most political parties. Of the personalities involved, Adam Smith and David Hume are perhaps the best known, but there were others who made significant contributions, such as Thomas Reid, Adam Ferguson and John Millar. It is difficult today to appreciate just how influential Scotland was during that period. Scotland’s thought leadership was so powerful that Voltaire was moved to write: “...we look to Scotland for all our ideas of civilisation”. Coming from one of the leading thinkers of his age, that was praise indeed. That was over two hundred years ago. Much has changed since then. If Voltaire were alive today, he would be unlikely to say what he said then. For a variety of reasons, which could be argued for a year and a day, Scotland is no longer a global thought leader in the ways that it was during the Enlightenment or during the heyday of its inventiveness. There is no doubt in my mind that Scotland needs something big to boost its confidence. It needs a world-class project. Much as it pains me to admit it, Scotland no longer leads the world in any significant respect. Yes, it is true that we are still the home of golf, tartan and whisky and that we produced Dolly the Sheep, but, although important, these pale beside the influence of the Enlightenment. The question I keep asking myself is; can Scotland become a global thought leader again? If we could, that would put Scotland on the world map again, and it would do wonders for the self-esteem and confidence of the Scottish people. Thought leadership is consciously revolutionary and, in the nature of things, often subversive. It would not be thought leadership otherwise. It is often uncomfortable for those in power or in secure positions because it cannot help questioning the status quo. Indeed, if the status quo cannot be questioned, how do we expect to move forward? It is all very well for us to look back to the Scottish Enlightenment with pride, but we would do well to remember that these thinkers were revolutionary. And it was precisely because the culture in Scotland in the 18th Century encouraged original thinking and questioning of the status quo that the Enlightenment was able to take place. We need to remind ourselves that what we regard today as the self-evident truths of modernism and market economics were seen as revolutionary ideas two hundred years ago. Although we might not like to admit it, we have modernism and market economics largely because Scotland used to support revolutionary, subversive thinking. If we are to make genuine progress towards whatever is going to replace modernism and market economics – one thing is certain, these will not be with us forever – then we have to encourage revolutionary, subversive thinking. If we do not, we are unlikely to move forward in any fundamental sense. One thing is clear: if Scotland does not take the lead in this, some other country will. There is absolutely nothing, in principle, to prevent Scotland from becoming a thought leader once again. The personalities are here and they are world class. My only question is whether Scotland is willing to encourage and support thought leadership? Does Scotland currently encourage and facilitate revolutionary, subversive thinking or does it discourage this kind of thinking? If the former, then we have the possibility of becoming a global thought leader once again. If the latter, then we really have to decide whether we ever want to lead the world again in some significant respect. A culture of encouragement would mean, for example, that the Scottish Executive and Scottish business actively encourage and support thinking, ideas and activities that challenge them and make them feel uncomfortable. But it would have to mean more than this. It would also have to mean that Scotland’s people and organisations adopt a much more positive attitude towards change and uncertainty. Rather than seeing change and uncertainty as threats to be resisted, they need to learn to see them as exciting opportunities to do something new and different. The healthiest attitude to change is that you lead the change. The unhealthiest attitude is that you resist the change. Which of those two attitudes best describes Scotland today? The simple fact is that no nation can be a thought leader unless it is able to welcome change and uncertainty. Of all the culture changes needed in Scotland, this is the most important. Scotland is unlikely to take its place among the confident nations of the world until the culture changes. Our leaders can, if they are willing, help to lead this change by encouraging radical, original thinking that questions deep-seated beliefs and the status quo. I can think of two big subjects in which Scotland could be a thought leader. They are sustainable development and health. Why? Partly because there are historical precedents, but mainly because these are, in my opinion, the two areas that most urgently need global thought leadership. The historical precedents are striking. For example, Scotland’s inventiveness in public health and medicine helped to pave the way for what has become the modern medical model of health and healthcare, and there is no doubt that this has been immensely useful. However, there is a growing sense, in and beyond Scotland, that we need to fundamentally rethink what we mean by ‘health’ and ‘healthcare’ because, however hard we try, we are hardly making a dent in some important health statistics. Modern medicine is undoubtedly good at some things, particularly mechanical repair, emergency intervention, pain relief and vaccination. But it is less good at other things, such as mental and emotional illness, as well as the so-called ‘diseases of civilisation’. And it is ill-equipped to deal with some of the deeper, root causes of ill health, such as the pressures and values of modern living. There is a growing sense that we need to develop and adopt a new model of health and healthcare. Scotland could, if she wished, lead the way on this, just as she led the way in the past. There is another important historical precedent. Scotland played a large role in developing what has become modern market economics. Although, like modern medicine, this economics has been very useful in many respects, there is a growing body of opinion that thinks that it may have outlived its usefulness, in the sense that the benefits it brings are increasingly outweighed by its negative effects, be they social, environmental, cultural, or in health. Although the current model of economics clearly brings more money and material things for many people, it does not seem to bring the ‘higher things’ of life, such as happiness, fulfilment, health, peace and wisdom. If it does not bring these things, then we have to wonder what model of economics would bring them. I strongly suspect the answer would be a model of economics that had sustainable development at its heart. For the avoidance of doubt, I am not talking here about sustainable development as it seems to be understood in most business and government circles – who interpret the concept to mean ‘economic growth as usual, while trying to do as little damage as possible to the natural environment’. I am talking about something quite different. I am talking about the original meaning of sustainable development, which goes right back to the Sixties. It differs from the current interpretation in two important respects. First, it does not assume that ‘development’ means economic growth. It assumes that ‘development’ means development, and we really need to decide what it is that we wish to develop, in social and human terms. Do we want, for example, to develop people as people and communities as communities? If so, what does this mean in practice? The second difference is that the original meaning was not restricted to the sustainability of the natural environment. It went beyond that, to embrace the other vital systems that we need to sustain and enhance if we are to survive and move forward. So, while it is undoubtedly true that we must wisely care for nature and the planet if we are to survive, we must also wisely care for ourselves – as individuals and societies. If we do not, we will decline as individuals and societies. That is clearly unsustainable. When I speak with thought leaders in Scotland, I am left in no doubt that the health of individuals and society is under just as much threat as the natural environment, and that we urgently need to redefine ‘sustainable development’ to include the sustainability of individuals and societies. Scotland was eminently able to develop a powerful model of economics in the past. It was a model appropriate for the conditions of its time. I see no reason why Scotland cannot develop a new model of economics appropriate to the very different conditions of today. However, this will happen only if Scotland’s brightest thinkers are actively encouraged to question current beliefs and assumptions and the status quo. If Scotland wishes to become a significant world leader again, the field is wide open for us to lead the way in developing new models of health and economics, and in applying these models in practice. We already have two of the three necessary components in place – original thinkers, and the global need for this thinking. All that remains is to put the third component in place – a culture that encourages and supports original thinking and original action even when, at the time, it seems to be revolutionary and subversive. If anyone doubts the need for a fundamental re-think of health and economics, perhaps because they feel the current models are ‘correct’ and ‘true’, it is well worth reminding ourselves that nothing is constant. Much of what we are convinced is true today will be replaced by broader, deeper, more accurate knowledge in the future. This should help to put our current knowledge into perspective. We are all familiar with the amused astonishment we feel when we look back and recollect how limited our understanding of something was in the past compared to our current understanding of the same thing. We would do well to recognise that the same process operates forward in time as well as backwards. Our current understanding, which we may well feel to be adequate if not complete today, will almost certainly come to be regarded in time with the same amused astonishment with which we regard our past efforts. Humility is in order as well as excitement when considering our achievements! Chris Thomson is Director of Central Purpose

Yes getting to sent to this place today for an away day out at work, I think they call it team building or some shite like that, but its an interesting place. Dynamic Earth

Bringing things up to their current date after posting the darker side of Edinburgh here is a picture of Leith Walk, I live at the end of this street and its about 3/4 of a mile from Edinburgh City Centre Leith has had a fairly colourful history, in most recent times is because of the author Irvine Welsh who wrote the Trainspotting novel, he lived round the corner from myself and also the train station that he was referring to is now a supermarket. Also we have the Royal Yacht Brittania but I have never visited due to the fact I hate all the touristy bits. One of the best pubs that I have found in Leith is called the Port o Leith bar in Constitution Street, there has been many a night spent steaming and dancing on the bar at weekends, I kid you not, although since the smoking ban has been brought in I have hardly been out, but now I have stopped smoking hope to get back out there give it time. It is one of the truly mad places you can walk into and find people from all over the world having a drink together.

Going to use this to report on living in Scotland, contrary to popular belief people from outside Scotland who I meet in person and in other places naturally assume I am Scottish, but alas, I am originally English and was born in Liverpool. I have been living in Scotland for nearly 16 years now and it is the only place that ever felt like home, anyway I am rambling will post more on the bits that interest me and try and get some photos, as we dont all go round acting like Braveheart and baring our arses at tourists. So watch this space