JDMcDsblog

Have started reading through Clive James’ latest volume,  ”Cultural Amnesia-notes in the margin of my time”. A series of essays on over 100 figures that James believes have shaped our world and our lives, for good and bad, this book promises to be a heady, rich and sweeping survey of culture in its widest sense, spanning the arts, politics, media and literature.  In my first browse, I am already discovering the names of Pre War Jewishintellectuals new to me,  such as Peter Altenberg and Egon Fridell, author of Cultural history of the New Age, who tragically committed suicide on the eve of his arrest during Kristallnacht rather than contemplate the destruction of all he cared for at the hands of the Nazis. I am looking forward to finding out more about these, and other key figures.

Interestingly, there are few scientists in James’ list.  Nevertheless, the essays cover the life and times of an eclectic group of men and women-heroes like Fridell, Raymond Aron and villains such as Hitler, Satlin and Mao, as well as those he regards as their intellectual apologists such as Sartre and Brecht. He praises the liberal democrats and cafe society thinkers of pre War Vienna, but he also celebrates trail blazing cultural icons of popular culture  such as Louis Armstrong, and Tony Curtis.

 It prompted me to refect on who we regard as the key thinkers today, both in Scotland and in the wider world. Prospect Magazine recently produced a list of the world’s top 100 intellectuals. Heading the list was linguist Noam Chomsky, followed by author and academic Umberto Eco, then scientist and scourge of religion, Richard Dawkins. many others are leading writers and thinkers, (although not many more scientists) few were women, fewer were from the Developing World, and none was Scottish.

Given our tradition of the 18th Enlightment and the “Democratic Intellect” defined by Davie in 1961 ( Davie, G. E. (1961), The Democratic Intellect (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press) Davie, G. E. (1986), The Crisis of the Democratic Intellect (Edinburgh, Polygon) it is valid to ask,  “whither Scottish intellectual society in the 21st century?”

Who are regarded as the key thinkers of devolved, 21st century Scotland? In the 20th century there were people like Sir Patrick Geddes, Sorley Mclaean, Hugh MacDiarmid; today, I can think of people like Alastair Gray, Kenneth White, Richard Holloway, but who else might we include; it would be interesting to know. What about great work being done in science, medicine for example?

In 1999, Tony McManus, in the inaugural lecture to the Scottish Teachers of Language and Literature, called for cultural revival, saying,

“The education we must try to revive and renew is the ideas-based and ideas-aiming education which George Davie in particular has outlined in his books The Democratic Intellect and The Crisis in the Democratic Intellect….I believe that we, (teachers of language and literature,) ……. inhabit the last sizeable space in the system where ideas remain at the root of what we do and at the height of our aspirations for our pupils. But, as the philistine society seeks to stifle these educational values with the values of training and the structures of systems management and the language of the technocrat, it is incumbent upon us to fight back, to insist upon (English) as being about the development of critical and imaginative thinking, the development of cultural awareness and the development of clear and strong expression of these things.”

A different slant is offered by  Jean Barr, who, writing in 2006 for Scottish Affairs,  argues the case for reframing the democratic intellect by contrasting Davie unfavourably with social scientist Elaine Yeo, whose book The Contest for Social Space, highlights the significance of “grassroots”local, experienced knowledge against the imposed knowledge system of professional intellectuals;

My interest in Yeo’s work stems primarily from the way in which .. her own writing strategy is aimed at re-framing intellectual history from the usual parading of a few great thinkers towards a wider .. more ‘generous’ notion of contextualisation. This brings into focus the context of social and political struggle in the development of ideas ….Yeo’s book seeks to show how the intellectual confidence of less powerful people became gradually undermined by professionals and by the state taking over fields like education where the production of knowledge took place. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries see the vast expansion of academic institutions and state agencies with new professionals ‘policing the gateways’ and marginalising older collective styles of producing knowledge in learned societies and social movements. 

Perhaps the difference bewteen Davie’s and Yeo’s views of the history and philosphy of education find their way into debates within staffrooms about the role of education-the balance between a need to pass on a shared body of knowledge and the importance of  young people being empowered to to constrcut and develop their own philospohy of learning, perhaps increasigly based on the “democracy of web 2.0.”

Too much for one post, but ideas to unpack and return to over the next few weeks!