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It's quite a moment to be starting a weekly Scottish column again. This was a fortnight when two of our political and cultural titans succumbed to cancer, causing many to dwell on the direction of their nation and culture.
But the deaths of Jimmy Reid and Edwin Morgan shouldn't be about nostalgia for possibilities lost or past. They were two progressive futurists, who in their own ways tried to keep the options open in Scotland.
At the start of the heartfelt collective outpouring for Reid over the last week, I was phoning up Glasgow University library to find out if they had the complete text of his '72 Rectorial address. I'd read it when I was preparing for my own 1990 Rectorial: and as I tracked down the famous front-page reprint on the front of the New York Times, I noticed a section hadn't made it to publication.
Here's the passage: “If automation and technology is accompanied as it must be with full employment, then the leisure time available to man will be enormously increased. If that is so, then our whole concept of education must change.
““The whole object must be to equip and educate people for life, not solely for work or a profession. The creative use of leisure, in communion with, and in service to our fellow human beings can and must become an important element in self-fulfilment.”
Now, it'd be easy to say that all this “leisure society” stuff is even more seventies than Jimmy's famous sideburns. Look how the application of hi-tech turned out, at least in this part of the world.
Workaholism for an educated middle-class, enslaved to global schedules and now-now-now consumer expectations. Underemployment and unemployment for those whose labour became an development opportunity for India, China and elsewhere (not least in shipbuilding). Capital markets driven to hyperspeed by automatic computer exchanges, escaping the grip of any human authority.
We were promised jetpacks, indeed.
Jimmy's saving insight comes in his first clause – “accompanied as it must be with full employment”. If Reid was a young man today, he'd be thumping some tubs in Scotland about the inevitability of jobs losses across public and private sectors.
I suggest, however, that he'd have forced us to be honest about the last forty years. New technology did offer us more free time for the “creative use of leisure, in communion with and in service to our fellow human beings” – but we exchanged it for money, overwork and consumerism.
Add the financial crisis to our carbon-environmental crisis, and a grand questioning of the Scottish lifestyle is about to begin. How many working hours do we really need to put in, and how much stuff do we need to have? And can Scots be visionary about using the political “sovereignty” we have in order to answer those questions?
If we give credence to Jimmy's vision that “the flowering of each individual’s personality and talents is the pre-condition for everyone’s development”, then we couldn't find a greater exemplar of that than Edwin Morgan.
No-one should doubt the centrality of the man to Scottish popular culture. I was able to wrest my 13-year-old daughter out of the coils of Facebook with news of Morgan's death - she'd covered him for English last year. For about 30 blissful mins the boy-man Justin Bieber was forgotten, and the language of visiting Martians, Loch Ness Monsters, and the Computer's First Xmas was happily explored and remembered.
Out of many early moments of pride at the opening of the Scottish Parliament, Edwin's celebratory poem was so completely appropriate it would have made you burst: garrulous, funny, aspirational, politically savvy, elegant and demotic as it needed to be.
In touch with all the avant-garde movements of his era – particularly cybernetics – Morgan's poetry imagined the consciousness of machines, aliens, geology. He was just as interested in the possibilities of technology and science to enable a “quality of life” as any idealistic Clydeside activist. It's reported that in Morgan's final days, the best service his friends could do was to bring him regular copies of Scientific American, National Geographic and the New York Review of Books to his bedside.
Edwin's years as an educator at Glasgow University overlapped with Reid's as a Rector there, which gives you some sense of the quality of the era. But we shouldn't just be pining for radical heydays. Between the gay modernist, and the Govan communist, there's a reservoir of possibilities for the Scottish future that shows no signs of drying up. I hope to have some fun charting them over the next while, in this fine online publication.
For more from Pat Kane on Scottish affairs, visit www.thoughtland.info