Why Arthur Herman is Totally Wrong...

Whenever I encounter Herman's book How the Scots Invented the Modern World - which is far too often - I wish that I could afford to purchase them all for a mass burning. It seems that the representation of Scotland and Scottish history never manages to take a step forward without taking at least another step backward.

Rather than attempt to address the book's entire scope, I would like to specifically deal with Herman's horrendous treatment of the Scottish Highlanders and ask what image of the Highlanders this popular book will present to the unsuspecting reading public.

Herman, a coordinator at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C. and a history professor, is a good storyteller, and he has woven together a very complex tapestry of intellectual, cultural, social, and religious history. His accessible approach will introduce many American readers to certain aspects of Scottish history - particularly aspects that celebrate the triumph of modernity, globalization, capitalism, and the English language.

It is not uncommon for neighboring societies who speak different languages and have irreconcilable cultural norms to see one another in a less than favorable light. The Gaelic and Anglophone worlds have had antagonistic relations for centuries, but each has had its own legitimate point of view. We have reams of material composed by elite and non-elite classes of Highlanders to express their own perceptions of the Lowlanders and the English. We might expect a modern book about the Scots take the various points of view of all Scots, Highland and Lowland, into account. Yet, like so many other historians, Herman takes the opinions of English travelers and Lowland Enlightenment intellectuals as providing the "objective reality" of Highland society. Are not Highlanders bona fide Scots also?

Most of the leaders of the Scottish Enlightenment had a view of human progress that we would call Darwinist: human society advances in stages, from primitive to civilized, with a refinement of manners and an accumulation of material surplus as society develops. It is a highly ethnocentric view of the world, joined with the idea of race in the nineteenth century.

Highlanders, it was claimed, were not only materially impoverished, but intellectually crude and culturally barbaric. "Poverty was the keynote to everything in the Highlands. [...] If poverty was one keynote of Highland life, war and violence was another," Herman claims (pp. 109, 110), taking his Anglophone predecessors at their word. This sweeping generalization can be objected to on the grounds of cultural bias and ignoring Gaelic texts and perspectives. We learn nothing in this book of Gaeldom's intellectual and artistic achievements, and very little of their contributions to the historical processes that Herman glorifies. One must also ask why the atrocities of Englishmen such as Oliver Cromwell go without comment - could we not equally characterize Anglophone society as inherently warlike, violent, and materially acquisitive by recourse to Highland sources? Having portrayed Gaels as not having an inherently valuable culture, readers may not be bothered to learn more about them or mourn their passing.

Herman does display some sympathy for the suffering of Highlanders as individuals when he discusses the history of the Clearances (pp. 256-8). However, like many others, he seems to assume that the extirpation of the Gaels, along with their culture and language, was an inevitable stage in the advancement of "civilization" in Scotland (p. 259), predetermined by inexorable laws unassailable by human intervention. One might ask why, if nobody believes that the extirpation of Native Americans or the Jews in Germany was inevitable, Scottish Highlanders still form some special excusable case of ethnocide in human history.

A lack of familiarity with Highland culture and history causes Herman to make some unfortunate errors when describing the Highlanders, especially by overemphasizing the split between Highlanders and Lowlanders. He begins his chapter about this cultural division (Chapter Five, "A Land Divided") with a quote from Cassius Dio in the third century, which he claims is "The Highlanders are Great Thieves." The problem with this quote is that there was no such recognizable entity as a "Highlander" for another thousand years or more!!! All of the peoples of Scotland at that time were Celts of one type or another, and all such Iron Age people practiced cattle raiding as an integral aspect of their martial culture and redistribution of wealth. Just as silly is his claim that haggis was a Highland foodstuff (p. 109), when it was really a Lowland dish. There are numerous other minor errors with the spelling and definition of Highland terms. So much for his ability to carry out thorough research.

He claims that the Earl of Mar was a Lowland laird and had no clan to summon (p. 48), despite the fact that Gaelic was spoken in the Braes of Mar into the twentieth century. He says that when the Highland pageant was staged for King George IV in 1822, most Edinburghers had no idea what real Highlanders looked like (p. 265). Against this is the fact Highlanders involved in the drove trade frequented Edinburgh, the Highland Society was active in Edinburgh from 1784, and Gaelic celebrities such as Duncan Ban Macintyre (who was a member of the Edinburgh City Guard from 1766-1793) were residents of the capitol.

The explanation of the development of Macpherson's Ossian is a complex one, and most people making reference to it still get the story wrong. While this book does not stray off target as much as many have, Herman manages to misrepresent Ossian as merely a "literary hoax" (obviously not having read anything since Samuel Johnson's rants). Rather than confirming that the critics of Macpherson were correct, the results of the research of the Highland Society in 1805 demonstrated that, while Macpherson made highly selective and creative usage of Gaelic oral tradition (which he had known since his youth), adapting it to the sensibilities of his contemporary Anglophone audience, it was not wholly "his own invention" (p. 251). One might as well call the Kalevala or Wagner's Ring of the Nibelungen literary forgeries.

Herman notes that the Romantic Movement, especially the novels of Sir Walter Scott, was able to "salvage" elements of Highland tradition and keep them alive in the imagination of the public (p. 270). The pity is that Highlanders, like Native Americans, were only allowed to live proudly and independently on the printed page. While they might be idealized as "noble" in fiction their language and culture were in fact the victims of a policy of institutionalized Anglicization. Little recompense that they could be heroes and heroines when they were in reality marginalized as racially inferior. Herman implies (p. 251) that the "multicultural passions of our day" are little more than a wooly-headed reworking of Rousseau's Noble Savage myth, but it seems that some of the messages of Post-Modernism, Post-Colonialism, and Anti-Globalization have passed him by on this topic. It seems an ironic statement coming from someone involved in culture at the Smithsonian.

Herman makes much of the migration of Scots to North America, playing up the old chestnut that Scottish culture was able to fully realize its potential in North America, rather than in Scotland. It is unfortunate that he relies heavily on two books, Cracker Culture and Albion's Seed, whose depictions of migrant groups indulge heavily in ethnic stereotypes and oversimplification. He makes brief mention of the Highlanders in the Cape Fear Valley (pp. 197, 211-12), and it is perhaps just as well that he does not attempt to delve any deeper into that story.

If we were to make a hypothetical "translation" of the book into the story of the United States' role in globalization, I would hope that Herman's value judgments about indigenous culture and Modernity would be more obvious. Let's imagine the book were to claim that the real important people in America - the people with the big ideas that were to improve the world - were the Europeans, and that the Native Peoples were little more than savages who were really much better off by being forced to adopt the civilization of their new superiors. Not only have scholars recently demonstrated the degree to which American institutions and cultural norms were influenced by Native Americans, but I hope that educated North Americans have finally let go of the myth that Anglophone civilization is inherently superior in every way.

Herman concludes that "The great insight of the Scottish Enlightenment was to insist that human beings need to free themselves from myths and to see the world as it really is" (p. 361). He ignores one of the great insights of modern social science, that no culture is free of myths, and instead seems to accept that the tenets of Modernity are value-free and objective.

This book will introduce aspects of Scottish history, and of the Scottish Diaspora, to many people in North America. Unfortunately, however, it will also reinforce anti-Highland stereotypes and prejudices that have been active for centuries, and which other ethnic minorities have had some success in undermining.

For those wanting an alternative point of view of the Scottish Enlightenment and incorporation into the United Kingdom, I would highly recommend Colin Kidd's Subverting Scotland's Past. It is not an easy read, as Herman is, but it contains valuable insights that Herman doesn't seem able or willing to address.