The Royal Society of Edinburgh In association with British Council Scotland The Institute for Advanced Studies in the

Humanities (University of Edinburgh) RSA UK Museums Galleries Scotland UNESCO UKNC Scotland Committee A Panel Discussion organised as part of the Festival of Politics Whose Heritage, Whose Society?
25 August 2011

Report by Peter Barr

Can culture, in all its forms, help us to understand better Scotland's place in the world, as well as address the issues that face Scottish and global society?

Participants:
Professor Jan McDonald FRSE (Chair): Professor Emerita and Honorary Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Glasgow Mark O'Neill: Director of Policy, Research and Development at Glasgow Life Matthew Taylor: Chief Executive, Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce Professor Neil Blain: Head of Film, Media & Journalism Department, Stirling University David Greig: Playwright Introducing the discussion, Professor McDonald said that the question involved complex and often apparently incompatible issues. Matthew Taylor kicked off by saying that we should not be afraid to have a conversation about the arts, culture and heritage. He then proceeded to compare two very different attitudes to art. First, he cited Abraham Lincoln's three Republican rivals in the contest for the US Presidential nomination in 1860, who all declared that reading the novels of Walter Scott improved one's character and encouraged a sense of adventure. Then, he described how the Turner Prize-winning artist Jeremy Deller declared that there was no social purpose to his work, which he simply produced for its own sake. In Taylor's view, Deller's attitude is typical of many artists' reaction to totalitarianism, rejecting the idea of giving any account of their work. Turning his attention to Scotland, he described the national cultural strategy report as anaemic as if it had been downloaded from government-policies-are-us.com. In his opinion, three spurious and unhelpful concepts tend to dominate discussions on national cultural strategy: 1. excellence (art for art's sake) 2. more bums on seats 3. the contribution to the creative economy (including everything from high art to video games) Taylor believes we should focus on who we are, what we say to the world and what we can contribute, and said there was a very important word missing in Scotland's strategy document: Enlightenment. Despite the fact that Scotland was the cradle of the modern world, in terms of economics, science and philosophy, we don't export enlightenment but kilts.

The aspiration gap was Taylor's next concern, saying that we can't create the future we aspire to by thinking the same. Debt is our failure to face difficult decisions, but even though the Prime Minister is right to talk about the Big Society, and even though his diagnosis is correct, his Implementation is all over the place. We have to renew our thinking about human nature, said Taylor. We need people to change and understand human nature. David Hume was right to say that reason is the slave of our emotions, and the core ideas of the Enlightenment autonomy, universalism and humanism are still important now. Taylor then stressed the importance of empathy and how we can create a better future by ceasing to be passengers on the train pulled along by science, markets and bureaucracy and paying more attention to the legacy of the Scottish Enlightenment. Professor Blain then drew on the example of Ireland, describing how he talked with nationalist political representatives in the north 20 years ago (the heyday of post-modernism theory) about their aspiration to promote Irish culture, and their response to the problem of living in a globalised world where hybridisation is the norm. Nineteenth century Irish nationalism had been led by cultural concerns focusing variously on intellectual, artistic, and sporting domains, and a process of deanglicisation. But in a world where identities were ever more complex, the question was now more of how to live our national lives in a global context. All over Europe, localities continued to reassert themselves and these local identities were every bit as substantial as the facts of globalization yet always contested in very dynamic circumstances. Our cultural identity is a process, said Blain, adding: History goes forward and heritage goes back and tidies it up a bit. Blain then discussed the idea of imagined communities, as described by the writer Benedict Anderson, and how since the 1980s we have often ceased to imagine community. Now it is as easy to imagine disunity, fracture, atomisation and even hatred. We need to work at re-imagining communities, while critically assessing the claims of community presently associated with social media. Even if people still tend naturally to define themselves to an important degree as local, we also need to protect some aspects of local cultures from global pressures, he continued. From a Scottish perspective, the UK media continue to be London-centric and our cinemas are as always full of US movies, but perhaps the important questions are now about the challenges of the digital world. To be recognisable is a decent and sensible thing for a small nation to aspire to, but even though it is easy to participate in the digital world, it is hard to get noticed for the strengths of our culture rather than the awfulness of social indicators which Scotland is so often known for. We need to grow our culture more equally across the whole nation, Blain concluded. Mark O'Neill started by reminding the audience that Walter Scott had been blamed by Mark Twain for the US Civil War because he encouraged a notion of chivalry which became popular in the South. According to O'Neill, the three main challenges are to: 1. explain more clearly what publicly-funded culture is for (making sure we relate it to economic, health and educational policy) 2. revisit the intrinsic and instrumental values of culture to understand how they are linked 3. focus on Scottish values such as quality and justice Glasgow is the cuckoo in the national nest, due to its scale and problems. The city spends more on culture than any other city in the rest of the country and its museums and galleries attract more visits than any outside London. But Glasgow has also been described as the City of the damned because of its deep social problems. Public funding and cultural policies exist to address public issues and hence need to engage with these inequalities. In the Victorian era, Sir Robert Peel described the arts as softening the problems of society and strengthening the bonds between rich and poor. Our cultural institutions were designed to compensate

for the worst consequences of the anarchic creative destruction caused by industrialisation. And the survival of the market society would be ensured by the humanisation provide by the arts. Some people believe in art for art's sake and also that art has nothing to do with politics, but O'Neill believes the arts are instrumental in improving life even helping us live longer lives by having an emotional impact. There is extensive epidemiological evidence that Art is good for you, and the social and cultural benefits are closely interlinked. One study shows that people who read more live longer and concludes that it may be something to do with meaning rather than the simple pleasure of reading. The Victorians were right, said O'Neill, but it is not so much to do with moral benefit as the difference made by being stimulated by the arts. Social renewal is possible via the impact of art. And cultural events don't have an impact without engaging the audience. Culture is usually used as a positive word, but it also has its dark side, he continued it can be used to exclude, stereotype and humiliate people. Racism and sectarianism are cultural phenomena. The biggest challenge of the arts is to adapt to change and continue to enrich human life. And in Scotland's case, that means a culture embedded with our national values of quality and social justice. David Greig then shared his more jumbled and personal thoughts about Scotland and culture. As a young boy, having just arrived in Scotland from Nigeria, where he was born, Greig sometimes felt he didn't even belong in his own family. Sitting on the sofa in the living room at Hogmanay, surrounded by his family, he was amazed by the strange-sounding accents and the songs that his relatives sang, as his uncle leaned over to tell him, Remember this, son this is your heritage! Later, said Greig, he became fascinated with Scottishness and became a Scottish culture nerd, exploring the archives of the Scottish Poetry Library. Can I be me and be Scottish? he wondered, as he read the Lallans verse of Hugh MacDiarmid. As he grew older, however, he grew more interested in theatre, thinking actors were more fun than poems. At first, he wrote plays set in Europe, so the characters would speak more like himself, but as his work developed, and the idea of Scottish theatre evolved from the traditional approach of the 1950s to the more radical ideas of the 1980s, followed by a period when writers fused the two philosophies and found their own voice, he realised he could write Scottish plays without writing in Scots. As well as refusing to be obsessed with Scottishness, Greig said every sentence we write about culture that we begin with 'we' is probably a lie. In the theatre, bad plays use 'we' when they focus on generalisation, rather than expressing their ideas via individual stories which put the audience in other people's shoes what the playwright Jo Clifford describes as the empathy gym. Quoting Bertold Brecht's maxim that theatre can be a transformative art, especially for everyone who makes it, Greig then referred to the example of the Venezuelan Youth Orchestra, which not only makes great music but also transforms people's lives an idea which Richard Holloway (Chair of the Scottish Arts Council) once suggested could form the foundation of arts policy in Scotland. One of Greig's ambitions is to bring people into contact with the making of theatre and engage not as a passive audience but as collaborators. That is why the National Theatre a theatre without walls seeks to engage with every student in Scotland. As Brecht said, If you make theatre, you force empathy. This is not just a nice thing to do but how to put in place a whole new way of thinking, added Greig. The boy on the sofa was given a very sound lesson, said Greig. His uncle was right we make our own culture. And in a world of budget cuts, the do-it-yourself approach may grow in importance.

Q&A Greig's remarks about participation drew support from two members of the audience. One person commented that it is not things done to people but people doing things that helps create a good society, while another said that political interference in the arts can be highly destructive. Q: In the Second Enlightenment, would women and minorities be included? And what about the role of technology? Matthew Taylor responded that 21st-Century Enlightenment must of course recognise diversity and embrace different ideas of Enlightenment which should also not be used as a battering ram against Islamic culture, as in the past. Rather than technology, funds should go towards participation which can be a truly life-changing experience. Technology is good at relaying information but not good at encouraging participation. It's easy to create content, but the relationship between digital consumption and participation is uncomfortable. Mark O'Neill cautioned that it's hard to scale participation, so we need a different model and should try to scale attendance. That means we should focus on the quality of the experience, so more people share it. John Maynard Keynes, first Chairman of the Arts Council, set the tone for arts funding in the UK when he supported the elite bodies rather than mass participation, but O'Neill said we still need big events to generate interest in the arts and engage parents. Neil Blain said we should avoid top-down decisions in the arts and that technology can be a positive force, despite the fact that it is sometimes put to horrible uses. David Greig then described a theatre initiative in Morocco which has survived, despite a lack of public funding, by engaging the support of the communities in which it stages performances by getting local people directly involved who then feel that the theatre belongs to them. Theatre instantly creates its own community in towns all over the world, he said, and cannot be technologised. Q: We don't inherit from our ancestors, we borrow from our children. What would arts policy look like if we followed that maxim? Can we separate the arts and politics and national identity? Mark O'Neill said it would be bizarre to separate the arts and politics because they are so interlinked. Even self-indulgent art has some relation to politics, apart from the censorship sometimes enforced. Neil Blain believed it was a depressing certainty that arts budgets in the UK are the first to be cut during a recession, while other countries in Europe seek to protect the arts. David Greig said it could be argued that the Scottish cultural renaissance of the 1980s led to devolution and that Parliament has since returned the favour. In the absence of an army, he continued, the arts are how you tell the world that you exist. Matthew Taylor called for more playfulness when it came to national identity, and said that if Scotland became independent, he would lay claim to some of Scotland's leading Enlightenment figures, including James Clerk Maxwell, Adam Smith and David Hume, because they regarded themselves as North Britons. There is too much seriousness about identity, politics and culture, he said, and we now have an opportunity to think hard about who we are and how we want to live, and what it means to be human.

Opinions expressed here do not necessarily represent the views of the RSE, nor of its Fellows The Royal Society of Edinburgh, Scotlands National Academy, is Scottish Charity No. SC000470