Humpty-Dumpty Logic for the Highlands

BRIAN MORTON ponders the findings of the Cultural Commission report
 

IT’S OFFICIAL. We are living in a Creative Age. Grounds for rejoicing, I’d say. Unless it turns out to be another version of the Age of Aquarius: long promised, joyfully awaited, but stubbornly unapparent.

The Cultural Commission has reported. It’s a very long report, even when you take away the annexes that prove how diverse – or how cluttered – our creative infrastructure is here in Scotland. It repeats its premises frequently and forcefully. The arts are important. They are – or should be – part of a basic civic package for all. The arts need support. And they need money. Nothing there that even the most ardent proponent of hands-off, arm’s-length anti-interventionism could possibly argue with.

There is, however, a single overriding premise which informs the tone and content of the report and it bears looking at, particularly when the report is read, as it were, upside down, from the viewpoint of the Highlands and not an Edinburgh terrace.

James Boyle and his fellow commissioners have been strongly influenced by the work of Richard Florida and others, represented in such books as The Rise of the Creative Class and Europe in the Creative Age. Their general conclusion is that with the shrinkage of the manufacturing economy in the West and the rise of new information technologies the new rising class consists of individuals and groups devoted to creativity.

Florida is not suggesting that the old industrial proletariat or the yet older craft guilds have been replaced with cadres of poets, choreographers, painters on silk or in enamels, or theatre troupes, but with, quite simply, the generation of ideas. By this definition, brainstorming business ideas, new social projects and initiatives, anything from blue sky thinking to brownfield planning falls under the rubric of creativity.

The Cultural Commission’s report is not intentionally divisive; indeed, anything but. In practice, though, it is a sharp reminder that the Holyrood purview is even less helpful than the old view from Westminster.

It’s an idea that squares very comfortably with the Cultural Commission’s working definition of “culture” as, well, just about anything within the human realm. It would be very attractive to imagine Jack McConnell and his ministers reading and discussing such books, or perhaps having lunchtime discussions over John Passmore’s The Perfectibility of Man or debating Francis Fukuyama “end of history” hypothesis, but we probably shouldn’t expect too much.

Suffice it to say that the First Minister’s St Andrew’s Day 2003 speech – a symbolic focus for the Cultural Commission’s report and the equally symbolic date in 2005 when Boyle hopes to hear a response – was very much concerned with a similar scenario. With the 20th century challenges of universal health care and school education pretty much won (eh?) and established as “unquestioned pillars” of modern society, imperatives have shifted in the direction of Florida’s “creative age”.

Viewed from a realistic perspective, and certainly from the perspective of Highland region, such ideas are about as sustaining as frozen orange juice, from Florida or elsewhere. This is the kind of debate that makes Old Marxists out of people who weren’t Marxists in the first place.

At somewhere around this point, the old distinction between base and superstructure heaves into view once again. Boyle and his colleagues – who did, admittedly, do their legwork and press the appropriate flesh – take an optimistically postmodern view of cultural realities in the Highlands.

With the invention of the Internet we are somehow all mystically connected; with devolution the needs of local arts bodies outside the sub-metropolitan M8 corridor are somehow thrown into a sharp new focus.

This is all reminiscent of the CERN scientist who “discovered” that we and – indeed the whole known universe – may all be part of the same substance, connected at the deepest level. It is a discovery that hasn’t managed to prevent road traffic accidents, war, or the death of a hungry child every few seconds. It remains an interesting philosophical possibility.

And so does the Cultural Commission’s view of the Scottish regions as somehow part of a political embrace that is no longer remote and paternal but tender and maternal. Delightful in theory, but not yet the first thing one feels on getting up in the morning. “Ah, yes, how connected I feel, how in touch with all those other creatives out there”.

The straightforward reality is that until the economic and infrastructural priorities that still affect the Highlands are dealt with – the road networks, jobs, school places, a responsible attitude to outworking at all levels – there is little point in proclaiming the new cultural Zion.

The Cultural Commission’s report is not intentionally divisive; indeed, anything but. In practice, though, it is a sharp reminder that the Holyrood purview is even less helpful than the old view from Westminster. That pioneering arts minister Jennie Lee, born just over a century ago, was painfully aware that policy decisions taken in London, even taken with her fiercely egalitarian instincts, were unlikely to make much impact two, three or four hundred miles from London.

Jennie was at the time in the midst of an affair with Arnold Goodman, who took a more soberly realistic view of how the arts might be disseminated even through a small country.

To proclaim that we have entered a new age, with new social priorities is a very easy way of magicking the old priorities out of view.

He once told me, “Only when people have the economic security, the physical mobility and the leisured confidence to become absorbed in the arts will it be worth ‘taking opera to the Midlands’” – the quote marks were obvious in the voice – “or giving the Scotch new galleries and theatres. Until then, they have to be allowed the time and resources to make their own fixes, by which time they may not need or want a centralised system of arts funding and administration.” (From an unpublished interview, October 1989.)

The logic is a bit tortured: no point trying to help artists in the regions until they enjoy the same socio-economic status as yourself, by which time they won’t need your help. But it’s possible to see the logic at least, and a fatalistic shrug in the direction of more urgent priorities is more honest than the bland utopianism of the McConnell/Boyle model for the Scottish regions.

The success of DCA and of An Lanntair has shown that commitedly run and adequately funded arts centres do eventually – or quite suddenly in the Dundee case – generate a gravitational pull that is akin to old-fashioned vanguardism; in other words, sometimes the arts can work proactively on a wider social fabric, generating debate, excitement, participation and effective product even in the absence of what look like the “right” economic conditions.

Unfortunately, such cases are relatively rare and are usually dependent on the critical mass of potential audience only found in a major city or a large town with an axial position in the transport infrastructure. Inverness may be such a place, but Inverness has other irons in the fire.
 The most worrying aspect of the McConnell/Boyle equation is its excluded middle. To proclaim that we have entered a new age, with new social priorities is a very easy way of magicking the old priorities out of view.

Highland arts are as tied to Highland economies as are the arts everwhere. Of the 1.5 million “creatives” living and working in Scotland, how many are to be found outwith Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dundee, Aberdeen, Inverness and Paisley?

How are they organised, both horizontally in communities and vertically, within their respective specialisms? How do they communicate, other than by wretched e-mail? And where do they go to see their ideas enacted?

Scotland’s strength in anything from pop music to computer games is undoubted. Its weakness in robust acceptance of the connectedness of economic and – in the narrow sense this time – “cultural” productivity should be too.
 What James Boyle and his commissioners have done as regards the Highlands is to declare the darkness already banished and then to press forward with models that take the Highlands’ creative self-development as read rather than as still problematic.

It’s Humpty-Dumpty logic, almost worthy of politicians, and it would be both a juicy irony and a delightful example of life sometimes triumphing over prejudice were Jack McConnell to stand up on St Andrew’s day and say yes, fine, all very well, but aren’t the commissioners being as hasty as I maybe was two years ago? Maybe we can’t devolve the arts from everything else we have to deal with, so let’s rope them back into the bigger picture, where they belong . . .
 

Brian Morton is a well-known freelance writer, broadcaster and cultural commentator. He lives in Argyll.

© Brian Morton, 2005

Link

• Cultural Commission website