Montgomery ‘Scotty’ Scott: A Feasibility Study

A starship. A warp-bubble riding, Casimir-vacuum squeezing, Alcubierre-drive-powered behemoth. Silently, she slips from the skein of the interstellar void; vast, geometry-altering energies puckering the fabric of spacetime off bow and stern. Agile now in her superluminal blister, she hugs the displaced zone. Almost-impossibly-fine stabilising adjustments centre her there, at the heart of the gyre. Satisfied with his work, he turns from the console and smiles, straightening the cuffs of his tight, red jersey.

We know this character. Or we think we do. He is a cod-sci-fi fairytale hero – a Scot as lensed through an imaginary crystal of purest dilithium. From Linlithgow to the great beyond he carries his sense of duty, his acerbic wit and his pessimism-laced engineering prowess. Though often labouring under the apprehension that his vessel’s drives have exceeded calculable design tolerances, his own tolerances to the shocks and alarms of the ‘ final frontier’ appear limitless.

How might we build such a Scot? We have an abundance of raw materials: technical savvy, thrawn determination, egalitarian aspiration. However, we need the correct conditions to convert raw materials into honed devices. Without those conditions, technical expertise may never be drawn out through education and training, determination may slump into indifference or grind down into angry exasperation, and hierarchical ‘me first’ culture may smother the nascent tachyons of soaring ambition.

Engineering genius can, of course, emerge under less-than-ideal circumstances. The varied, and sometimes tragic, histories of inspirational figures of Scotland’s past, such as Watt, Telford and (adoptively) Kelvin, are testament to the great resilience of some intellects. But this is not the past. Though often used as mere sound-bite by those with wealth and influence, some of us care deeply about true equality of opportunity.

Another aspect of the Scotty-engineering scenario seems obvious: for there ever to be Scots in interstellar space, ‘Scottishness’ must survive for hundreds of years to come. Inevitably, our culture and ‘national identity’ will metamorphose into something very different to what we understand of them today; however, if we believe that there is a thread of what we are that can endure through the myriad transformations ahead of us, we should begin to ponder the nature of that thread and to wonder whether it has ulterior value. Our choice is then clear: if we find it robust and valid, we should seek to preserve and enhance it; if we find it fragile and baseless, we should abandon it to the tidal forces of cultural homogeneity.

Historically, erosion or destruction of national identities by external forces was rather more common than was willing relinquishment. Chipping them away piece by distinctive piece or wiping them out in frenzied tabula rasa conquests, the powerful asserted their deity-given entitlements to subjugate, ‘civilise’ and assimilate vulnerable cultures. Our own patchwork nation experienced such shattering pressures, yet somehow, something called Scotland persisted. Now that we are free to choose, will we choose to follow the thread of Scotland – even to the stars – or will we choose relinquishment?

In Scotty’s universe, ‘the Federation’ is a federal republic of planetary governments. A logical step between here and there would be a world federation of national governments. Perhaps of necessity, some form of world government will emerge; looming existential threats will generate a gravitational pull towards such cooperation. As an independent nation, the Republic of Scotland could take its place in that shared endeavour, adding its idiosyncratic elements to a bright new global alloy.

Politically and socially, our young Montgomery is shaped by a context of interplanetary cooperation; nevertheless, as our avatar of Scottish idiosyncrasy, pluck and endeavour, he needs a distinctive voice and platform. He understands that his identity is multi-layered, and he is comfortable with that. He recognises the same of his nation, and understands that it has – consensually – ceded many of its old powers to global governance. But ceding ‘sovereignty’ is so much less of an issue now that all the sovereigns have long gone.

Young Scotty is a product of a new Enlightenment, and of a new Settlement, but he is also a child of the echoes of The Great Catharsis: a shared wracking sob for all who were lost and for all who were caused never to exist; for all who were persecuted and for all who succumbed to self-persecution; for the lies, for the ignorance, for the complicity. And afterwards – in the new light – relief and tranquility. A reckoning, a sigh, a silence, then a quickening. The old edifices of blood and stone were taken down to make way for towering songs of hyperdiamond and billowing graphene. The ghostless world was ready to open itself to the ghostless universe.

Here, then, is Montgomery’s centre – the heart of his gyre.

Depending on our choices, historiographers of the future may view the months in the run-up to Scotland’s independence referendum as a kind of ‘phase transition’ for our nation. This term is used in physics to describe those brief moments of sudden change from one phase state to another, such as the moment when water begins to boil; a grain of salt dropped into superheated water provides a ‘nucleation site’ for the transition, bringing it on more rapidly. In some circumstances, phase transitions may also cause cascading chain reactions. Perhaps this type of explanation would appeal to our technically-minded Scotty.

The chance to be chief engineers of our own futures has been hard-won. As we build steam with our grains of salt, we may find that we initiate a cascading warp-core of change. Isn’t it about time? Though beyond this event horizon we cannot see, we have more to fear from stagnation than from transformation.

Perhaps, for my own ends, I have hijacked Scotty. So, in concluding this brief shuttle excursion, I’ll return him to where he belongs. We step back into our own parallel universe, where the gritty immediacy of everyday concerns so often crushes our hopes for the future. It is true that all we have is the present, and that looking far ahead may be no more than daydreaming, but we could try to remember that every moment is a beginning and an opportunity to spark something amazing.

As he disappears from sight along with the protracted flare of his ship, do we find Montgomery feasible? If we assume that the future will be short, the answer is no. If, however, we feel the tantalising tug of the new and unexplored, there is a complex, humbling and breathtaking ride ahead of us. Warp nine.

We the Persons: Why the New Scotland must be a Republic

Image © Debs

It’s an institution that seems always to have been there. You don’t like it much, but you’re not offended by it. You know it’s quite expensive, and you’re not keen on such disparity of wealth, but that just seems a fact of life. It just... is. It was put in place a long time ago, and has persisted – through historical wobbles and much bloodshed, but with a certain continuity of character – to the present day.

You know your place.

I am writing of the institution of monarchy. And it is wrong. Those who support it are wrong, and most of the standard, lazy perceptions of it I have outlined above are wrong. It is desperately, unreconstructedly morally bereft. We should be offended by it. The costs of it run way beyond the financial aspect. It is a relatively new bad idea. It is, but it never had to be, and it doesn’t have to be ever again. Moreover, the disparity of ‘station’ that it embodies and symbolises is an affront not only to what it means to be human, but also to what it means to be a person.

What does it really represent? Hatred, inequality, discrimination, racism, sectarianism, elitism, substratism.

‘It’s like wolves,’ said the artist friend-of-a-friend, who I met during an up-until-then pleasant evening out. ‘There’s always a leader.’ What, I asked, could he possibly mean by that? The queen is the leader of our wolf pack? We can reason; we can choose; we can communicate at high levels of abstraction; we have art, music, literature, science, mathematics; we are capable of setting up equitable systems of governance... . But you compare us to a wolf pack... as a way of justifying the institution of monarchy? (I was less eloquent than this.) Was he really appealing to a deeply-misunderstood form of group or natural selection to explain the social phenomenon of monarchy?

By this point, although I had never seen it, I had decided that his art must be dire. A man with such a tenuous grasp of natural and moral philosophy must be a hack. The words of John Lydon rang in my head: ‘Like a terrible artist, you’re using no shadow.’ But where was my use of shadow? Why couldn’t I find the grey areas?

Trying to reason with a royalist is like trying to reason with a unidirectional tennis ball serving machine. They don’t listen, they have no alternative angles, and they keep firing fuzzy projectiles at you faster than you can ready yourself to return them.

Vulpine splatterer balls aside, how can we find a simple way to explain why monarchic systems are immoral? It looks like we’ll have to strip it back to the board, and paint by ethical numbers:

1. Are monarchs super-beings?
   If yes, in what do their superpowers consist? If no, then in what does their ‘right to rule’ consist?
   
2. If monarchs were in fact super-beings, would this justify the lavishing upon them of great wealth and privilege not afforded to ‘ordinary’ beings?
   
3. Conversely, if monarchs are in fact ‘ordinary’ beings, is there a way conferring great wealth and privilege upon them and not upon others that does not constitute discrimination against those others?
   
4. If a monarch is in fact an ordinary being, is it like the leader of a wolf pack?
   If yes, how did ‘nature’ select it to be the leader of the pack? If no, how can we justify giving so many of the scarce resources of the majority to an individual who is not even a pack leader?
   
5. What does a ‘divine’ right to rule consist in? And if it is only a figure of speech – if there is no direct linkage to God – is there something else that that a divine right to rule can consist in?
   
6. Can blood be magical?
   If it can, where does it come from, and how does it attain its supernatural properties? If it cannot, how can ‘royal blood’ be considered in any way special?
   
7. If a monarch is not a super-being, is not the leader of a wolf pack, does not have any ‘divine right’, and does not possess magical blood, are there still reasons why – democratically chosen by no-one – he/she should be allowed a role in the governance of a democratic country?
   If yes, what are those reasons. If no, why then do we allow this?
   
8. If a monarch cannot be allowed such a role, are there ways in which he/she can still be a symbolic ‘figurehead’?
   If yes, what is represented by this symbol? If no, why should we allow even this.
   

So, you see, even if the queen were an X-Men character,¹ we would still be unable to find moral ways to elevate her above all others. If she were a Professor Xavier, we might consider her wise and compassionate, but most would still accept that she could be granted additional powers only by being democratically elected to govern. If she were a Magneto, we might well elevate her out of fear of her powers, but there would be no way of framing this as a morally-acceptable situation. She is, in fact, neither, and there exists no morally-acceptable way to set her and her family above all others.

In his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, the Scottish philosopher David Hume said

If there be any suspicion that the course of nature may change, and that the past may be no rule for the future, all experience becomes useless, and can give rise to no inference or conclusion. It is impossible, therefore, that any arguments from experience can prove this resemblance of the past to the future.²

Continued support for institutions of monarchy is based upon this mistaken resemblance of the past to the future. The continuity of monarchy is an illusion. It is an experience become useless, and worse than useless. If there is a future worth living in, it will be populated by citizen-persons who will have opportunities to elevate themselves, but who will not connive to set themselves above others by instilling fear, and who will not expect riches and obeisance to be lavished upon them because of supernaturalistic, essentialist notions of ‘divine right’, or ‘birthright’, or ‘royal blood’.

I see no place – in the future of the long now – for kings, queens, princes, or princesses. New diversity is to be welcomed, and such outdated concepts represent the opposite of diversity. In leaving behind these baseless, discriminatory forms of ‘us and them’, we find that there are only persons. It would be best for our new, democratic nation-state of Scotland if there were only persons – citizens – from day one.

1. James Hughes, Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future (Cambridge, MA: Westview Press, 2004), sec. Siding with the X–Men.

2. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Reprinted from the Posthumous edition of 1777 (Oxford: University College, 1902).

Emerging Scotland: Transcript of Speech at YES Skye Event

Image © Claire Hannah

The following is based upon my notes and memories of a speech I made at a YES Skye event, in October 2013.

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 keeps presenting us with the same kind of tired old ideas about ourselves; it keeps us in a filter bubble; it limits the connections we can make. It is time to burst that bubble.

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.

Independence for Scotland isn’t destiny; it’s not fate. It’s a choice about how we shape our future. So get informed. And, when the time comes, choose wisely.

Scotland: An Abstracted State of Potential Grace (repost)

A wide-eyed Merida.
Image ©Alice the Photo Ninja

I used to be political; now I’m just politic.

Following on from my recent article Neuro with Everything, where I raised the vexatious issue of so-called neuropolitics, I will now take a deeper refractory look at our psychological blocks against things constitutional. Why are we uncomfortable about the mechanics of nationhood? Because we don’t really know what ‘nations’ are. Why is this relevant? Because, in Scotland, we are in a process of building a new one. Now, pass me that torque wrench.

Nations (yawn), how un-futuristic. Not so fast, there. While futurists tend to look forward to a time when all humankind will live in harmony, perhaps even under the auspices of a benevolent form of world government, some of us ponder what is the most expedient way to get there. Nations can be desperately un-futuristic, especially when they are cobbled together from the zombie vestiges of dead empires. Alternatively, they can be dynamic, paradigm-shifting agents in this world of exploding complexity.

Nations don’t exist. Countries don’t exist. Landmasses do exist, at least in the ordinary physical sense. People exist, living on landmasses. No, that’s not right. Roving biomasses exist on landmasses. Better. Some of these roving biological entities (us) are self-aware. These self-aware entities tend to group together with others whom they feel are like them – they are social entities. This can cause problems. These entities tend to argue with, fight with, and sometimes kill others whom they feel are dissimilar to them. Nations form. ‘In-groups’ delineate their territories using convenient geological boundaries, and then call these nation/territory constructs ‘countries’.

The term statist is often used as an insult, these days, against people who think that nation states can be effective vehicles for delivering on the needs and aspirations of individuals. You might expect such an attitude from capitalists (even the modern anarcho-capitalist variety) and ‘libertarians’, but why do many technoprogressive leftists also take this stance? I think it is because they assume that all nations, both existing and emerging, have been and will be built using the same failed templates that past nations used.

People are ‘agents’ within nations; neurons can be thought of as ‘agents’ within persons. Yet, perhaps because nations are seen as ‘not natural’ and ‘manufactured’ whereas persons are seen as wholly natural, we tend to dismiss the fact that they are both types of abstraction.[i] There are many ways in which neurons in their communicative context of human brains are different from humans in their communicative context of nations; I am not claiming that they produce the same types of abstraction, only that both can be seen as abstraction-generating agents of sorts.

Nations may behave unpredictably, but they each seem to have a unique ‘character’. They can be calm or aggressive, colourful or dour, outgoing or reclusive. They may form intimate relationships with other nations. Sometimes those relationships become strained, or abusively one-sided.

Scotland has a ‘character’. It is often identified as female. Some persons tend to think of her as traditional, wise, and cautious, but others see the growing scintilla in her eye. She craves.

We represent ourselves in myriad different ways. We change ourselves. We think. We act. Those of us who spend time pondering the future of the human race should not pretend that we can leap from here to utopia in a single bound. The Singularity might happen, but, then again, it might not. We need to interrogate our world, and engage with it. We cannot sit around waiting for some kind of ‘hard takeoff’.[ii]

The elevation of morality is important to me. I want to live in a morally-elevated world. On this trajectory, I choose the expedient of personal agency; I also find that I must choose the expedient of the fair, diverse, creative, forward-looking, independent nation state that I think we have an opportunity to create here. This may be unfashionable in futurist circles, but what should a futurist care for fashion?

Empires – and bloated nations that act like empires – shrink persons. They reduce us to mere ‘subjects’ with little more agency than synaptically-weak neurons in a conflicted brain. But consensual nations, chosen freely and fairly, can connect us together in fascinatingly teleodynamic ways. They can bring us together and help us to reach out. They can give us a clear voice in the growing din. Under the right circumstances, they can grant us citizenship within a well-adjusted, constantly-questioning, fully-functioning, enlightened ‘national consciousness’.

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[i]     D. Parfit. Reasons and Persons. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.

[ii]    Inspired by a talk, in 2013, by James Hughes Ph.D., of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies

Note: This article originally appeared on one of my other blogs, extravolution.com