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.