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| Image © Claire Hannah |
Hello. My name is D.J. MacLennan .
I'm from Skye, via Benbecula; via outer space, (I think, sometimes). I'm an
entrepreneur, but also – increasingly these days – a futurist thinker and
writer. And definitely more of a writer than a talker; as E.M. Forster once
said, ‘How do I know what I think until I see what I say.’ With a word
processor you can just blurt it onto the page, and then rearrange into something coherent
later on; it’s not so easy when you’re blurting it real-time, in front of an
audience.
My parents were in the SNP. My dad joined up at
university. He saw the importance of maintaining his culture, which he could
see being eroded away at that time. As a child, I wasn’t particularly
interested. To me, SNP meetings looked cosy enough, but boring – and certainly
not revolutionary: the province of ‘old people’. One element of their politics
that did interest me, however, was the anti-nuclear CND strand. Those of you
who were around during the 80s will remember that it was a time when fear of
nuclear holocaust pervaded the culture. It was everywhere – in books, in films,
in TV dramas, on the news. And this creeping fear affected me deeply.
As a teenager, I paid more attention to politics. I was a
bit socialist, a bit communist, and a fair bit nihilist. I learned about Westminster politics and its
strange traditions: Black Rod; herding into lobbies like sheep. All terribly
anachronistic. And I learned – a little – about my ‘culture’. Yes, it was
important, but I couldn’t engage with it; I was too busy thinking about the
future to connect with the past. There was nothing in it to interest me.
Nothing about the Scots who had helped to build the modern world – people like
the physicist James Clerk Maxwell, whose theories on electromagnetism were so
important to Einstein’s later discoveries.
So I immersed myself in visions of the future – in Arthur
C. Clarke, in Isaac Asimov, in Iain M. Banks, and in science-fiction movies;
always enjoying the optimistic future-scenarios more than the dystopian
ones. The potential of future civilisations attracted me, and our
freedom to choose such paths; I subscribed to The Clash’s ‘The future is
unwritten’ motto. (You’ll perhaps remember a similar one from The Terminator
– ‘There’s no fate but what we make.’)
And independence is about choice, not destiny. Some of the
old stagers of the independence movement perhaps feel that there is some kind
of cyclic logic to Scotland
becoming independent once again; but the truth is that it will only happen if we
choose it. And we must have the foresight to make that choice. When I got
involved in the devolution campaign in 1996/97, and later in the SNP, it was in
a spirit of optimism about our potential, and with the excited realisation that
we now had the freedom to choose.
The ‘No’ camp talk of ‘separation’, and try to spread fear
of that. But, of course, independence is not about separation. It’s actually a bridge
– a way of connecting. The UK
is a filter on the way we see ourselves. Despite its claims of
diversity, it creates a kind of mono-culture. Eli Pariser, internet activist and
co-founder of the petition website avaaz.org,
talks of ‘filter bubbles’. You may not have heard of them, but you will have
experienced them while online: You’ve bought something from a website in the
past, and then every time you are browsing you keep seeing that same thing,
or at least the same kind of thing, in advertisements. A computer
algorithm has ‘decided’ that that is what you want to buy, so it keeps
presenting it to you. The UK
We need new ideas, and new ways of seeing ourselves. We
need a new Enlightenment. The roots of enlightenment run deep in Scotland :
the egalitarianism of Burns; the philosophy of David Hume, which although often
focussed on the nature of the self, was really about understanding human
suffering, and our potential to break free of it. These early thinkers
were fully engaged in the wider concerns of all humanity: in morality, reason,
peace, empathy, and social justice. They sought to envision the kind of world
we could all wish to live in.
Sci-fi author William Gibson once said that ‘the future is
already here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet.’ Let’s not sit back and
watch as it becomes even less evenly distributed. We must act, or
see that precious Enlightenment ethos whittled away by cuts, injustice, and
right-wing ideology that is anathema to Scotland . In this case, it is not
pragmatic to wait. We must engage. It’s easy to forget – in this age of
distant, out-of-touch politicians, and disenfranchised voters – that politics
is all about engagement.
It suits those out-of-touch politicians to spread fears.
And one that we hear much of is the bogeyman of nationalism; to their
own ends, they smear the civic, egalitarian nature of the national movement in Scotland .
We hear little of the flip side of nationalism; I fear empires. They can
be belligerent, arrogant, and homogenising. They shrink us; turning is
into mere ‘subjects’. In any case, I am not really a nationalist, but an
internationalist. And I am a pragmatist (I probably won’t be a card-carrying
member of any political party after independence; I don’t even know which
parties will exist.) And, in this case, I am a normalisationist; it is
the normal state of small nations to be independent. But we must accept
that it is only a starting point.
And, yes, culture is important. So I choose my own. This can
include ‘traditional’ elements, but it is also a globe-spanning one of
thinkers, writers, scientists, and rationalists. It’s a fusion. Independence is a
practical means of setting a trajectory towards a culture that is dynamic and
diverse, never fixed. We must allow new culture, new society, and new types of
diversity to emerge. When the physicist Murray Gell-Mann said, ‘You
don’t need something more to get something more’, he meant that the ‘something
more’ is self-creating, under the right circumstances. In voting yes, we
are not trying to break anything, we are just trying to create the
circumstances for that desperately-needed new emergence in Scotland . Otherwise, we will end up
with more of the same – with something stiflingly fixed and undynamic –
and that’s just not good enough.
The Scottish author Iain M. Banks, a supporter of
independence – who sadly died recently – had a vision for the future of all
humankind (and indeed for all android-kind and alien-kind). This extract is
from a piece I wrote about him:
Science fiction worlds and futures mean little to me unless I can place myself in them. They must be alive to me, so that I can mingle with their inhabitants and look to their vistas. I imagine that Iain Banks was the same; as an optimist, he had to make at least some of those futures places where he could wish to be; futures, indeed, where he could wish us all to be. So he imagined a state of mind for The Culture – literally a culture of freedom to love, to change, to learn, to become, and to oppose the dark forces of retrogression.
To me, he was a visionary but also just an ordinary guy – the kind of guy who would have been irreverent fun to have as a dinner guest, glass of malt whisky in hand. And what now would I drink a toast to, in his memory? I would drink to the chance of the kind of future he brought to life in his books: I would drink to a culture of massive, magnanimous liberty.
