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Issue 9 - Shaping the modern world

History & Heritage

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Scotland Magazine Issue 9

Scotland Magazine Issue 9
July 2003

 

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Shaping the modern world

JAMES IRVINE-ROBERTSON EXAMINES THE PROLIFERATION OF GREAT MINDS AND IDEAS DURING THE 18TH-CENTURY ‘SCOTTISH ENLIGHTENMENT', WHICH HELPED SHAPE THE MODERN WORLD

Shaping the modern world (Issue 9)
The 17th century was grim in Scotland. Civil wars racked the nation, and it ended with religious fundamentalism, mass starvation, a Dutch king on the throne and virtual bankruptcy. In 1696, an 18 year-old student, Thomas Aitkenhead, declared that theology was “a rhapsody of feigned and ill-invented nonsense”. The young man apologised, but he was hanged for blasphemy.

The next century started no better, and, after the Union in 1707, parliament closed down and government moved to London.

The Treaty seemed to bring new taxes but no benefits, and the country became little more than an impoverished backwater.

But there were foundations for progress. The law, the church and education remained separate from those of England and were focuses for national improvement.

Literacy was the highest in Europe; parish schools were long established, and the Scots had a long tradition of respect for learning. No less than 17 rectors of the University of Paris up to the Reformation were Scots.

The universities were teaching the rising generation reason and tolerance. And the Kirk’s power was curtailed and the extremists marginalised by the Toleration Act in 1712 which permitted the Anglican liturgy.

In addition, the Patronage Act reasserted the right of local landowners to appoint ministers, and they favoured moderates.

By the 1720s prosperity began to flow from the Union, mostly spectacularly in Glasgow, whose tobacco lords dominated the trade with North America. The landed and merchant classes had money which they spent in the patronage of arts and ideas.

Within half a century, the country was transformed.

“It is to Scotland that we look for our idea of civilisation,” said Voltaire. Freedom of expression and intellectual curiosity had led to a cultural flowering that deservedly earned the age the title ‘Scottish Enlightenment’. Amyat, the king’s chemist, was able to say:

“Here I stand at what is called the Cross of Edinburgh, and can, in a few minutes, shake 50 men of genius and learning by the hand”. These ‘men of genius’ created the intellectual framework that underpins the modern world.

One of the godfathers of this revolution was Francis Hutcheson, professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow University, who taught his students, many of them future ministers, that all men and women were born free and equal, and that happiness came through helping others.

The other was a judge, Henry Home, Lord Kames, who explained that the development of mankind from hunter-gatherer to civilisation was based on his desire for property. Lord Kames set out the need for law and creating a balance between freedom and state authority.

Complete freedom is anarchy; complete authority is tyranny. Even today, every country debates this balance.

Round Kames’s dinner table clustered young men of remarkable accomplishment. The philosopher David Hume has been described as the most original thinker Europe has ever produced, basing his ideas about human behaviour on observation rather than theology.

But as a notorious atheist, not even his distinction could land him the chair of moral philosophy at Edinburgh, when virtually all academics were still ordained ministers.

Another of Kames’s protégés, James Boswell, extracted a deathbed interview from Hume in 1776, and, to the author’s consternation, he met his end calmly and even cheerfully still denying a divinity and an afterlife.

Dr Johnson, whose biography was Boswell’s masterpiece, was unimpressed. Hume must have been lying.

Others in Kames’s social circle were as influential. Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations is the foundation of modern economics and outlined the benefits that would flow from free enterprise and the free market.

John Millar and William Robertson established the analytical study of history, and the latter’s two-volume History of America remained the standard work on the subject for two centuries.

James Hutton was founder of modern geology. William Cullen was a pioneer chemist. Joseph Black discovered carbon dioxide, latent heat and specific heat, his pupil Rutherford nitrogen.

Glasgow University established modern teaching through lectures in the vernacular and the University of Edinburgh took over from Leyden in the Netherlands as the world-leader in the study and instruction of medicine. Adam Ferguson introduced the science of sociology.

In literature, Robert Burns was followed by Walter Scott. In painting, Allan Ramsay was succeeded by Henry Raeburn.

In architecture and design, Robert Adam was the giant of his age. The legal profession was studded with brilliant minds; the universities used teaching methods far ahead of England and the rest of Europe. Such men were not shooting stars, soaring above their contemporaries, but had colleagues, followers and rivals who jostled with them in the quality of their achievements.

Today, men of this calibre would have Nobel prizes and be pampered on university campuses, but until they built themselves the New Town to the north, they lived cheek-by-jowl with each other and all classes of society in towering stone tenement buildings that provided a rabbit warren of apartments alongside the High Street in Edinburgh.

What comes singing down the centuries from these people is that life was fun.

They were hugely convivial, meeting in oyster bars, taverns, at clubs and at dinner parties where they debated ferociously and exchanged ideas.

They drank vast quantities of claret. A two bottle man was commonplace. A three-bottle man deserved respect. A visitor to one such social occasion prudently feigned intoxication early to avoid a real collapse. He was startled by a hand fumbling at his throat:

“Dinna be feared, sir; it’s me,” said a reassuring voice.

“And who are you?”

“I’m just the lad that loosens the cravats”.