(Condensed, and slightly adapted, from the Professor Sir Tom Devine lecture at http://www.educationscotland.gov.uk/scottishenlightenment/introduction.asp)



"What made the Scottish Enlightenment possible?

It’s a real puzzle - because if you look at the period before the Enlightenment, Scotland was a poor country. They even executed witches a few decades before the Enlightenment and killed infidel blasphemers and heathens - the Ministers of the Church were not very tolerant. So how come a country like that contributed to one of the greatest cultural developments in 18th century Europe?

Three things. The first is, for many centuries, Scotland’s scholars had links with Europe - they had gone to European universities from the 13th century onwards and they were plugged into the ideas developing in those institutions.
One example: the great Edinburgh University medical school which was world famous in the 18th century (and still is) - it really started as a consequence of its founders having gone to university in Holland which was previously the most advanced centre.

The second thing is that after the Reformation, the reformers decided to establish a school in every parish. It didn’t happen immediately but by about a century and a half after the Reformation (which took place in the 1560-1570’s) many parts of Scotland had a school and that meant that there was a general respect for learning in this society.
We know that almost all children went to school in some areas for about three, four, five years. (One has to remember this was not compulsory and it wasn’t free and it was not universal,) But over time this eventually fed into a society which was comfortable with matters of the mind, which in a sense what the Enlightenment was all about.
So, during the period of the Enlightenment, a lot of the old barriers to cultural development began to collapse. The Presbyterian Church of Scotland, which had previously been fanatically opposed to new ideas, began to become more tolerant.

Thirdly (and related to the first two points) the Scottish thinkers, the scholars, the intellectuals, did not have to take political or religious sides - they, even David Hume, were able to discuss things reasonably freely. It was a civilised and sociable atmosphere. You could have an argument between two of the major figures but afterwards they would still remain friends.

All these things came together in a mix that helped to produce the Scottish Enlightenment.
It was, arguably, part of a general flowering of the world of the mind,
Unarguably, there was a degree of tolerance that had not previously existed."

The Two Cousins. Episode 8: Many Roberts bob about.

The Two Cousins

Episode 8: Many Roberts bob about.

Iain Smith

 

We last left Robert MacIver (in Episode 6) ten years into a USA career that was to last for most of four decades.

A measure of MacIver’s standing by 1936 was his receiving an honorary degree from the University of Harvard. He was included in a “roster of scholars, drawn from countries across the world, who were recipients of this recognition during the tercentenary of Harvard.” He refers in passing already to having an honorary degree –from Columbia. The universities of Harvard and of Columbia were then, and remain today by most calculations, in the top ten universities in the world.

Through these years there were ongoing tensions between Robert MacIver and an academic he himself had head-hunted, one Robert Lynd. Lynd had been recruited largely on the basis of a (still well-regarded) book “Middletown”, a study of a small USA town. Given that their central interests revolved around the concept of “community” (rather than “state”), one might expected the two Roberts to get on well with each other. But this proved not be the case. Robert Lynd tended to side with the young academics in Columbia who favoured a more statistically based methodology within the sociology department.

A vacancy occurred in the department in 1941. MacIver favoured appointing Robert K Merton whom he regarded as “the most promising of the younger sociologists”; Lynd favoured Paul Lazarsfeld, a more statistically-oriented scholar. In a classic academic compromise, both were appointed. Ironically, Robert K Merton (who died only recently) and Paul Lazarsfeld are today better remembered in the world-wide academic community of social scientists than either Maciver or Lynd.  By 1950, both Merton and Lazarsfeld were indeed world-class stars; but Robert MacIver regretted that it was the philosophy of the latter that dominated and shaped the Columbia sociology department.  He had a benign view of humanity in general; but was less forgiving of individual sociologists with whom he disagreed – a failing that is still general among many academic  communities.

Robert Maciver had passed the peak of his intellectual eminence as a sociologist. The world of sociology, especially in the USA had become - and remains to this day - one that is largely dominated by approaches towards which Robert MacIver was not well disposed.

Aged 68 in 1950, MacIver approached the age of compulsory retirement. This was not a prospect he relished. On retirement, he made a sideways shift from full-time sociologist into a part-time post in political theory and governance.

He writes amusingly about receiving an honorary degree from his alma mater, the University of Edinburgh (in 1952):-

“At Edinburgh one was expected to show up for the occasion in the cutaway coat and striped trousers of ‘morning dress’ and don before the ceremony the magnificent scarlet rob of the doctorate. The conferment itself was conducted in an atmosphere of sonorous solemnity and followed by a stately service in St Giles Cathedral. In the evening one sat on a dais at a full-dress banquet surrounded by university leaders and city dignitaries in official regalia. There was a series of toasts beginning with queen and country proposed in short style and witty speeches as the wine went round”

 

But he clearly enjoyed it: “Without being a devotee of ceremony, I felt it accented the significance of the occasion and made me sense more fully the honour that was being bestowed on me by a great historical institution.”

The same university in 2008 bestowed an honorary degree on Robert MacIver’s fellow-islander: Matthew Maciver, a distinguished son of Lewis of a later generation. Bill Lawson tells us that the two are related.  In 1952, when Robert collected his degree, the incoming Chancellor of the University of Edinburgh was HRH Prince Philip. In 2008, when Matthew collected his degree, Prince Philip still held the same office. Robert and Matthew seem to be the only two MacIvers (or Macivers) - and the only two Lewismen - ever to have been awarded an honorary degree by the University of Edinburgh. History does not record whether in 2008 Matthew wore “the cutaway coat and striped trousers of morning dress”, dress slightly unfamiliar to most sons of Portnaguran. 

 

The University of Aberdeen recently celebrated the centenary of its appointment of Robert MacIver. A current professor of sociology there has written :-

“MacIver was President of the American Sociological Association in 1940…….. , received numerous prizes for his publications and was awarded eight honorary degrees. He was the author of nearly twenty books. For a time these works became some of the standard texts in sociology.

“MacIver’s sociological work shows a fascination with the relationship between individuals and society, between individual autonomy and tight-knit communities, or put another way, the compatibility of individualism and strong social organization.

“It may well be that MacIver’s sociological writings are shaped by Stornoway as mediated through urban Toronto and up-town New York, in that his personal acquaintance with close knit communal life in the Western Isles and the individualized living of an urban metropolis may have given him particular insights into the relationship between individuals and society.

“……his Scottish upbringing had an enduring impact on his conception of sociology, despite having spent all but four years as a sociologist living and working outside Scotland.”

Let us for the moment give a last word to the American Sociological Association:-

“MacIver also had a continuing and judicious interest in many public issues. In The More Perfect Union (1949) he warned about the vicious circle of discrimination, deprivation, and accentuated racial prejudice. In Academic Freedom in Our Time (1955) he exposed contemporary assaults on academic freedom and convincingly demonstrated the importance of such freedom for a viable society. He directed a thorough investigation of delinquency programs in New York City which was summarized in one of his last books, The Prevention and Control of Delinquency (1966).”

By the very late 1960s, Professor MacIver was ailing. Ironically he (since his teenage years a lifelong agnostic, although not an atheist) went into New York Presbyterian Hospital - probably because it was the hospital of the University of Columbia. He had travelled a long way in his extended life.

There the 88-yr-old Robert MacIver died on June 15, 1970.

(to be concluded)

 

Iain Smith is a part-time writer who was formerly Dean of Education in the University of Strathclyde.

The Two Cousins: Episode 7

Episode 7: Hector goes to War

Iain Smith

In Episode 5, we left Hector MacIver teaching in Edinburgh and pursuing various literary interests.

One of MacIver’s school students, Robert Taubman, paints a vivid picture of MacIver as a very young teacher at the Royal High School in Edinburgh in 1934.

From Taubman’s description of the MacIver writings we get an impression why some of these caused Hector’s reputation in his native island to become a mixed one:-

“He wrote stories (for little magazines that are now untraceable) that were as close to the life of the Western Isles as he could go. It was the life of a pre-industrial imaginative people……… He had a certain notoriety at home as an enemy of the Kirk; but he was susceptible to the splendours and the spleen of the Gaelic pulpit and the language of damnation, and when a word like ‘fornication’ appeared in his stories it didn’t look so much stark as theological.”

Quite; but the view in Hector’s native village in the 1930s may have been just a touch less generous.

Certainly Hector was vocal in his opposition to the churches of his native island. In one piece he wrote:-

 “As interpreted by the Presbyterian ministers of the Hebrides, life is identified with ascetism and repression. The crucifixion of the body is the monotonous theme of all their discourses. Drinking, dancing, music and recreation are officially condemned. But these gentlemen in their fanatical and destructive campaign forget that such taboos cannot be imposed on country people, whose nature is to set more store on human values than on ascetic ones. And the more their human wants are denied, the more they tend to excess.”

World War II came; and MacIver joined the Navy. He writes modestly but eloquently about what was a hazardous occupation – an officer on board a destroyer on convoy duties in the North Atlantic.

“…in the midst of all this rigorous routine there were moments of pleasure and excitement-quite apart from the occasions when we were attacked- for attack and counter-attack became also part of the routine. A destroyer, by the very traits of her character, never fails to provide excitement; her movements are unpredictable, her vitality inexhaustible. In the very smoothest of seas, a shiver of life from her engine rooms runs through her whole fabric; she resembles the pulsating body of a greyhound preparing for the chase; and if she decides to turn in her tracks, as she often does, she exercises her narrow circle with the neatness of compass and pencil upon paper.

Anyway, for a whole summer, while we escorted convoys up and down the coast with our ship keeping guard, marshalling the long column of merchant ships and rounding up vagrants, I watched her with interest. I already felt that if, some day, I went back to my profession, I should often be tempted to digress from the strict theme of literature to talk for a moment about destroyers.”

 

His friend Neil Gunn writes to him “I wrote a book on the herring industry of a century ago, ‘the Silver Darlings’, and it’s to be filmed in the north later this year’.  As does Chris Grieve (Hugh MacDiarmid):-

“Sorry my reply is belated. The trouble is that working as an engineer on munitions, I have excessively long hours and practically no time to myself at all….. However hard physical work (hitherto unknown to me) has suited me well enough in every other respect, physically, psychologically and pecuniarily (sic) - and I venture to hope that you have a like tale to tell…”

 

One of Hector’s naval commanders was Angus, the Marquis of Graham, later the Duke of Montrose and famous (or infamous) in the 1960s in Ian Smith’s Rhodesian government. Graham had learned Gaelic at Balliol (where else indeed would a Scottish aristocrat choose to learn Gaelic?); and went to Shawbost on leave with MacIver. There he not only conversed with the locals in Gaelic: he also addressed an assembly of Nicolson Institute pupils in Gaelic.

As in other places in his autobiographical writing, MacIver’s belief in the supernatural comes through. He writes about an American officer with whom he had become friendly:-

“One day, when I was at sea, I turned to see him coming along the deck towards me. I was astounded for I knew his presence was an impossibility. He was smiling as if eager to share a good joke with me, but as he came closer, he suddenly vanished. Later, I found that his ship had been sunk, just at that time, with the loss of all hands.”

Despite being torpedoed twice (and on one of these occasions having a fellow-officer repel with an oar his efforts to climb aboard a half-filled lifeboat -  in a sea where exposure to low temperatures gave one a life expectancy measured in minutes), MacIver survived the war. He goes on holiday to Lewis after being demobbed and heckles Iain Macleod (later Chancellor of the Exchequer) who was the – unsuccessful – Conservative candidate for the Western Isles in the 1945 General Election.

 

At this point, having resumed his job as an English teacher, MacIver’s (often sketchy) autobiographical essay comes to an end; but his story was subsequently picked up by his wife.

Mary MacIver provides a fascinating explanation why so many people were attracted to Hector:-

 “I’ve always felt I missed a great deal, losing my Irish background and Hector embodied it for me. I think this was true for other people also, no matter how distinguished they were. People like Hugh McDiarmid, Louis MacNeice and Dylan Thomas saw in Hector not just a fascinating personality in his own right, and a wonderful raconteur, but also the representative of a world they would like to have grown up in  or, in Chris’s [Hugh McDiarmid’s] case, to have had much more personal contact with.”

In the cases of the first two, this is a plausible view; with Dylan Thomas, whose attitude to things Welsh was notoriously ambivalent, it seems more dubious.

Dylan Thomas [whose birth centenary is 2014] wrote to Hector with typical Thomas prose: “I do so hate it here in this toadish valley among slow rabbits and sly cows. Oxford is near, but full of young men. Our pub is cold and wild with dominoes.” Why Thomas disliked rabbits that were slow or cows that were sly or (for that matter) men that were young is not explained.

A later letter from the Thomas village of Laugharne does however explain one dislike “I am writing this with a vile Biro junior which cuts through paper and table-top, spits greased, mock-ink at shirt, eye and wall, and whose writing fades, sometimes conveniently, almost at once.”  The invention of László Bíró was indeed then fairly undependable.

This, as so often with Dylan Thomas, is the writing of a man at ease with words- although sadly not with himself.

 

(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.

The Two Cousins Episode 5

 

Iain Smith

 

We left Hector MacIver (in Episode 3) socialising with literary figures in Edinburgh.

 

By the late 1930s MacIver had obtained a teaching job at the prestigious Royal High School. But he had also now become even more set in the activity for which he became most famous (or notorious):

“How the walls of the Abbotsford or the Café Royal or Milne’s Bar echoed to the talk at this time, on the state of Scotland, as Chris (Hugh MacDiarmid) and Sidney [Goodsir Smith] and I set the Celtic world to rights. Clouds of blue smoke, gallons of beer and whisky, witty talk -heart to heart-, narrowness and prejudice flew out of the Abbot door.”

 

Hector had activities other than teaching and arguing. In a hostelry on Rose Street, Hector one night showed another side of his cultural talents. The musicologist Ronald Stevenson subsequently wrote:

“Within a few minutes of our meeting, we had got on to Scottish music and soon he was singing – I remember his pleasant baritone –songs from his native Isle of Lewis. And very unusual songs they were no ‘sangs o’ the cratur’ but strangely serene psalm songs sung in the Gaelic, with no less than ten, and sometimes more than a dozen, notes to each syllable. Such long-linked melismas I had never heard in any other vocal music.”

 

(This may well be a slight over-exaggeration: melismas –extended notes revolving around a single syllable of language- are found in Gregorian chant.)

 

Author and poet Louis MacNeice already knew Hector. A piece about MacNeice tells us in an aside something of Hector’s literary activity (most of which is now lost):

“MacIver had published on the iniquities of landlordism, the failures of the herring industry, subsidy and the dole, and the collapse of Lord Leverhulme’s attempt to set up manufacturing industry on Lewis.”

 

 

Hector’s friendship led to MacNeice visiting Lewis and staying with Hector’s family in Shawbost. This proved a somewhat traumatic event for all concerned:

“Louis had stayed with my family and me at An Gearraidh Buidhe and was supposed to be travelling with his wife. Actually he was not married!.... More than twenty years after, my family still became virulent when discussing the ‘immorality’ of his visit.”

 

Another writer explains

“Then, in 1937, (MacNeice) undertook a visit (apparently Longmans advanced £75) to the Hebrides. He was accompanied by his current crush, Nancy Sharp (she had recently left her husband, William Coldstream) who illustrated the subsequent book.”

 

A later writer (admittedly of the, allegedly liberal, 1960s) puts it more bluntly:-

“My English teacher, Hector MacIver, was his friend, the dedicatee of I Crossed the Minch which in 1938 launched the ribaldries of the poem “Bagpipe Music” while recording, though rather discreetly, how MacNeice ran off with the wife of the painter William Coldstream : surely deserving a Nobel Prize for libertinism.”

One description of the book says

 

“Following loosely in the footsteps of Johnson and Boswell, MacNeice describes with distinctive candour the people, customs and landscapes of the Hebrides. Alienated from the way of life he encountered in the islands yet utterly fascinated by it, Louis MacNeice provides a unique insight into a now vanished culture and, as such, the book is a fascinating social historical document of Scottish rural life in the late 1930s.”

The book included two poems that are generally acclaimed. The first quatrain of Leaving Barra reads:-

The dazzle on the sea, my darling,
Leads from the western channel
A carpet of brilliance taking
My leave for ever of the island.

 

And then there is the rightly and much renowned “Bagpipe Music”:-

It’s no go my honey love, it’s no go my poppet;
Work your hands from day to day, the winds will blow the profit.
The glass is falling hour by hour, the glass will fall for ever,
But if you break the bloody glass you won’t hold up the weather.

 

One has to search a little to find what effect Hector MacIver had on “I Crossed the Minch” other than being a genial host. But one critic picks out where in “I Crossed the Minch” there is clear evidence of MacNeice and MacIver collaborating in analysis of the difference between a dance in Shawbost, part of the “Celtic timelessness”, and a concert in the town of Stornoway - where the dancers were “becoming objectified, alienated products of the music industry.”

Or, as MacNeice himself put it in “I Crossed the Minch”   “… one could thank God that one was not a citizen of Stornoway….European man at his worst.” The point that MacIver and MacNeice seemed to be making was that the culture of entertainment in Shawbost was an indigenous local product; the culture of Stornoway they saw as an importation.

One 21^st century Hebridean critic has written to me:

“MacNeice's view of Stornoway. What did he expect? For centuries the town has been the antithesis of rural Lewis: anti-Gaelic, weak in religious faith, hedonistic, eager to adopt imported behavioural trends (e.g. cinema-going, flapper attire in the late 20s, complex female hairstyles). Cailleachs [old ladies]from distant townships like Gravir or Brenish would actually stop to stare at the latest outlandish fashions among the gilded urban youth.”

 

How much Hector appreciated MacNeice’s book is apparently (and sadly) unrecorded. This would have been interesting to know, not least because of what is said by one reviewer (in 2007) on the book’s re - publication:

 

“MacNeice moans about the Island people, the drab landscape, ‘the monotony of heather’, the food…... He gropes his way over the Islands with his eyes and ears closed. The only conversations he records are with people of standing; the editor of the Stornoway Gazette, which was produced in English, schoolteachers or his middle class friends………. The locals he mentions only in passing as a means of providing him hospitality which he appears to accept as his right. The Gaelic language he holds up as a barrier to local conversation”

 

 

 

Between one thing and another, one can understand why the book was as poorly received in Stornoway as it was in the MacIver home in Shawbost.

The Two Cousins: Episode 4

The Two Cousins

Episode 4: Robert as a scholar

Iain Smith

We saw in Episode 2 Robert MacIver leaving school and heading to university.

Robert’s narrative about being a student in Edinburgh in 1898 is interesting.

“I lived in a cheap but quite decently kept rooming house for students. All meals were included, simple but respectable meals – and the whole cost ran to about fourteen shillings a week. Occasionally I would indulge in the luxury of [dinner in] a small hotel near the Old University, and that never cost me more than a shilling.”

So, in a 30-week student year, he was spending £21 a year on board and lodgings. He also described how the university provided lectures, but regarded itself has having no pastoral or guidance function for students. For 19^th century Scottish universities, this was typical; and somewhat different to 19^th century Oxbridge. The days of halls of residence, of advisors of study, of university health services and so on lay somewhere far ahead. Of the Professor of Greek, he says: “Although I stood very high in the class, I do not recall ever having an interview with him.”

He played golf (pennies a round), saw Ellen Terry and Henry Irvine in The Merchant of Venice and watched a D’Oyly Carte production of The Mikado.

Interestingly, MacIver did not work during his summer holiday at home. He played golf with his father at the course in Melbost (now Stornoway Airport) and he studied in preparation for the second year at university. So clearly his bursary (and being in the family home during the long summer vacation) was sufficient to sustain him financially.

MacIver’s memoir remind us that university lecture halls in the 19^th century could be rowdy places, a tradition which extended (in abated form) at least into the 1960s; but is I believe now dead. And he also observed the rowdiness that could attend rectorial elections, a tradition that has survived.

After an uninspired second year, MacIver in his third year ends up joint first in the logic class. He records the fate of the student who shared the prize: “He was killed very early in the hideous folly of the First World War, and of its uncounted victims no one could have been more grievously miscast for soldiering than that gentle scholar.”

MacIver won a further scholarship which he used to take an extra year to ensure a 1^st Class Honours; and he duly succeeded in that ambition. Meanwhile he argues with classmates on the significance of the recently deceased Queen Victoria: “some of my pals …shared the general veneration of the queen as a great and wise ruler. I held she was a great symbol….but not great in her own wisdom as a policy-maker.”  MacIver’s formal studies at the time may have been classics; but one can see the promise of an ability that would make him a world-renowned social and political analyst. “I was developing a stronger interest in social movements and issues. Much as I felt that I had benefitted from my classical studies, I began to wish that I could enter the unexplored and still academically slighted social sciences.

Robert acquired the coveted first class honours in classics and proceeded to Oriel College Oxford with “a good-sized scholarship masquerading as a Bible clerkship…[and] the obligation of reciting a Latin grace several days a week after the gong had sounded for dinner in the college hall.” What his highly religious presbyterian father back in Stornoway thought of this is not recorded.

MacIver’s description of Oxford is of a tranquil life, to which he adapted with some ease. Of the upper class “commoners” (as opposed to those like such as he holding scholarships) he says “In spite of their greater savoir-faire I thought of them as more big-boyish, less adult, than our own youth.” His Provost dispensed tea from two teapots, one to provide water to warm the cups (that water then being discarded) and the other for the tea itself.  But, he says, “The more we studied the social and political life of ancient times, the more eager I was to learn about the doings and the troubles of our own tangled society.”

After his Oxford success, Robert MacIver was appointed a lecturer in the University of Aberdeen.

 

Today the University of Aberdeen website celebrates that appointment at length and with some pride:-

Robert MacIver

Despite its ancient origins, the University of Aberdeen was one of the first institutions in the UK and further afield to introduce the subject of sociology. In 1907 Robert MacIver (1882-1970), a young lecturer of local birth, was appointed as an assistant in Moral Philosophy but delivered lectures in the new subject. We believe that among his students at that time was the future father-in-law of the Chinese Communist leader, Chairman Mao. Whatever influence Aberdonian sociology had on the subsequent development of Maoism is unrecorded.

MacIver initially lectured in political science (“traditionally little more than an account of the doctrines of the well-known figures from Machiavelli to Hegel”). He planned however to write his first book on “the complicated relationships of men and groups and of the institutions that had grown up to facilitate control of these relations”.

Most significantly, he became in 1911 a lecturer in political science and sociology, the first person to be so designated in a Scottish university.

Robert went home for a holiday, probably about 1913. His father had bought a Model T Ford from the 1911-founded Ford factory in Trafford Park Manchester; and they both experimented with driving it on the Melbost golf course. Father MacIver diversified from his Harris Tweed company into car-hiring; and this was the origin of MacIver’s Garage, a well-known Stornoway company for many decades. (At some point about 1970, I heard for the first time about Robert M MacIver. I asked my mother whether she knew of him. “Yes.” she said. “Of course he came from MacIver’s Garage.” I understood then, and still understand today, that a rough translation of this was: “If one wants to be a world class sociologist, coming from the family of MacIver’s Garage naturally gives one a distinct head start.”)

(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.