The Two Cousins: Episode 6

The Two Cousins

Episode 6: Robert revisits Stornoway

Iain Smith

 

 

 

We last left Robert MacIver (in Episode 4) in Aberdeen. There the draft of his first book had won a Carnegie award. He married – to an Aberdonian, Ethel Peterkin.

But he moved on:-

 

He was appointed in 1915 to a post in political science in Toronto. So MacIver left the University of Aberdeen – resulting in the end, for some decades, of any teaching of sociology in the University of Aberdeen.

 

Temporarily leaving his pregnant wife and his first child behind, Robert sailed for the New World, a journey he regarded as a permanent migration. “I had no expectation of ever remigrating to my native land.”

 

The Canadian years saw MacIver:-

i.                 establish himself as well-regarded author;

ii.               begin to establish himself as someone who could be called upon by governments;

iii.             live through a period of thorough disillusionment with the post-War world.

 

His first book was The Community: A Sociological Study (1917), well received by most, apart from a review by Robert E Park –then one of the world’s foremost sociologists. The praise from the many counted less for MacIver than the criticism from Park. However, beneath MacIver’s benign manner, there seems to have been a trait of steel which manifested itself at several points in his life: he attributes Park’s views as much to a Park defect as to a MacIver inadequacy.

There followed Elements of Social Science (1921), a book “of modest, thin, back-street longevity” in the words of the author. It may indeed have been modest but it contains one of his best known quotations; and one which explains why MacIver did not always endear himself to American sociologists of the subsequent decades - who were often dedicated, first, to the pursuit of the empirical rather than the philosophical; and, second, to the strict measurement of social data.

 

“We are apt to think we know what time is because we can measure it, but no sooner do we reflect upon it than that illusion goes. So it appears that the range of the measureable is not the range of the knowable. There are things we can measure, like time, but yet our minds do not grasp their meaning. There are things we cannot measure, like happiness or pain, and yet their meaning is perfectly clear to us.”

 

In 1927, he migrated from Canada to the United States to become head of department at a college of the University of Columbia. “On a September morning we all arrived in New York, to make, as it turned out, the United States our homeland ever thereafter.” His journey from Stornoway to New York had been a long one chronologically (1898 to 1927); and academically and psychologically. He remained in the University of Columbia for some 23 years, for most of that time being professor of political philosophy and sociology.

Some 10 years later after going to the USA, Robert revisited his native island. This is chronicled in a contemporary essay which he later appended to his 1968 autobiography. So what did the great sociologist (and one who specialised in the idea of “community”) make of Lewis in the late 1930s? He writes well and yet with deceptive simplicity, his prose verging on poetry. As a description of Stornoway in the early 20^th century and as a recollection of teenage life there in the 1890s, it is hard to surpass:

 

“How unchanged the little town seems, especially to those who come from the changeful world without. The same kippering sheds, the same barrels and herring troughs, the same quays, the tides still ebbing and flowing between the same walls, the little boys still fishing off the same stone steps…. the same sombre religion, just as the same tides come up the bay. The traveller feels, perhaps with surprise, how deep are the roots of that life and custom from which he has gone apart. He has changed, but it abides.

“Here the spur of ambition first urged me to strive towards dawning goals. Here I was nursed in the strong uncomfortable language of heaven and hell, offering the oppressive alternatives of lurid damnation and meaningless bliss, and shook myself free at length, with vast relief, from their ancient spell. Here I learned, from the silent starry nights, the immutable eternity of law that rings about our little lives. Here I heard the secret voice of nature, borne through the winds and the waves, telling of life and death. Here lived my comrades and first friends, my rivals and boyish foes. Here was my home, where a father toiled for me and a mother watched over me with indomitable love. And here the light shining in the eyes of a girl first stirred profounder deeps, as an angel might descend to trouble the pool, and left me alone and wondering, subdued by a breathless, fearful joy.

 

“Such a land has bred its own people. Where the earth yields so little to their toil, men must follow the sea as well. A grave and patient race, they are content with little. They wring meagre crops of oats and potatoes from their crofts, and eke them out with the precious harvests of the sea. Precarious in another sense as well, for the sea is never to be trusted, and every village nurses the tragedy of the men………………and the boats that do not return.

 

“this people is much-enduring and sombre-minded. They have few comforts and few recreations, and even the later incline to melancholy. Their native songs are for the most part minor and plaintive, telling of far dreams and ancient yearning, of parted love and eternal farewell.”

 

His characterisation of Lewis religion (comparable to that of his cousin, who wrote similar things at a similar time) is a bleak one. As is his judgment of its effects on local culture:-

“It holds the quintessence of this religious spirit, which has none of the boisterous joy in salvation evinced, for example, by the east coast fishermen or the blithe sense of liberation from sin that, for example, the Salvation Army proclaims…..

“It regards art and beauty as lures of the devil or at best as profane pursuits unworthy of the seriousness of life. “

One can understand why Professor MacIver, despite his renown, did not endear himself to the community from which he had arisen.

 

It was his last visit to Lewis, although not to Scotland: Professor Robert MacIver did not ever again return to his native island. 

(to be continued)

Iain Smith was formerly Dean of Education in the University of Strathclyde. He welcomes feedback at i.r.m.smith@strath.ac.uk.