I’ve just arrived back home from one of the nicest weddings I’ve ever attended. It was at the spectacular Glen Tanar Ballroom and St Lesmo’s Chapel, outside Aboyne, in Royal Deeside. It was the wedding of a good friend from my university days. A former colleague from the RNR, who’d pursued an exciting career in the civil service and both the Navy and Army Reserves. Her dashing, tweed-suited groom had also served in the Air Force.
Travelling from outside Edinburgh, through Royal Deeside is one of the most beautiful car journeys in the world. It is one that takes you along the lowland East Coast, with a mountainous Highland backdrop coming into dramatic focus as you venture inland. Politically, these East Coast regions have always had closer social and economic ties to Europe and London, via North Sea trading routes. The lowland sentiment for the monarchy and the union may have diminished in recent generations, but Royal Deeside remains a fairly conservative area, populated by farmers, land owners and small business owners.
I don’t want to hijack the wedding of a dear friend for my own purposes. I don’t know if my friend really wants to be associated with my writing, to be honest. So I’ll just say that it was an absolutely wonderful, classically British, Christian wedding.
I spent the evening making good new friends. Particularly those partners of good old friends. The latter being more difficult to obtain than the former, I have found this method of acquiring friends a trustworthy shortcut.
The crowd was relatively young and lively. I recognised many of the faces from the various military functions I attended at University. Most had gone on to enjoy exciting and serious careers in the Royal Marines, RAF and the Army. Others, into finance, the civil service, entrepreneurship and Academia. All of whom completely reverted to their energetic 20-year-old selves, as soon as the grape juice kicked in, and the ceilidh music worked its ancient magic.
Of course, most had travelled a great distance to attend a Highland Wedding. (Capitalised for good reason). Many from the City of London, or farther afield. The Bride and Groom themselves from abroad. The crowd were mostly English, or foreign-born. Including the Padre enlisted to conduct the service. I Vow to Thee, My Country, was sung with heart, and without cynicism.
These people love Scotland. They also love 500 miles, the Dashing White Sergeant (seasick tablets recommended) and the Bonnie Banks of Loch Lomond.
Naturally, conversation turned to Queen Nicola.
Our illustrious ‘leader’ of the Scottish ‘Government’, (formerly the Scottish Executive, until Westminster needed something from them in 2012 and capitulated the title ‘Government’) this week asked for a controversial referendum on ‘Independence’ to be held in October 2023.
My friends, old and new, love their country. They love Scotland, Scottish culture and all it has brought to the table, in these past 315 years, 2 months, 3 days including today, that we have been legally united as one kingdom. They do not wish our nations to break up, in the same way that nobody attending the wedding wants to see any couple there break up. They care. They worry. They express concern.
In light of the overturning of Roe vs Wade, our cousins in the USA face similar challenges in justifying the continuation of their own particular ‘marriage of States’. I think the similarities between our two situations run deeper than most political commentators would like to contemplate.Many serious commentators have recently expressed concern that we live on the edge of civil war, and almost 50% of Americans believe they will see such a war within their own lifetime.
The Padre delivered a wonderful service, with Brian-Blessed-like gusto. In it, he made one statement that brought up an idea that I have often found difficult to accept. In between the important and beautiful rituals, where we bore witness and promised to support the marriage between our friends, a description of God was provided. ‘God is Love’.
That’s a tough one for me. If God is love, then why does he brutally kill so many people in the old testament? But, in pondering what Love is, I think we can begin to understand something important. Love, of a country, or partner, is rarely unconditional. It is always exclusive and possessive. Love discriminates.
I used to be an evangelical atheist, so I’m fully aware of every argument against what I’m about to say. But in recent years, my understanding of philosophy, evolutionary science, symbolism and the human situation has developed enough for me to have the humility to accept some things on faith. I believe these things to be relevant to everyone alive in the West today.
I love a good wedding. I believe that weddings are an ancient and evolved tradition. One that not only pre-dates modern capitalism and statism but religion itself. Indeed, leading evolutionary biological theory and primatology seems to indicate that the development of cooking, enabled pair bonding to become one of the foundations of our species. That would suggest that a form of marriage has been the basis of our social structure since before homo-sapiens even existed—part of a way of behaviour that caused us to become different from other ape species.
In October I will be celebrating my 8th year of marriage. My wife, being Jewish, still thinks that eight years comes under the category of ‘newly-weds’. Despite having three children, and having lived in 12 homes, across 4 states in the USA/UK, we won’t count as properly married in her mind until we hit the 10-year anniversary. Jewish women believe in marriage very strongly. They say a matchmaker (Schadkhn) can obtain automatic entry to heaven if they make three introductions resulting in marriage.
Even in this day and age, when a gentile marries a Jew, he’d better take his vows seriously.
In 8 years, I’ve come to love being married in ways that are counter-intuitive, particularly when faced with the popular culture in the West that aims to ridicule the institution. ‘It’s nothing but a contract’; ‘It’s unnatural, man is promiscuous’; no fault divorce and falling-out-of-love is just ‘the modern way’.
In a dichotomous fashion, the act of commitment becomes in itself the catalyst and the cement. The discipline provides freedom.When you volunteer for the sacrifice, it is no sacrifice at all.
Judeo-Christian marriage is considered sacred. It is a promise, made before witnesses and God, that you will commit and dedicate your life to bonding with your partner. In this respect, the two ‘same-sex’ weddings I have recently attended are entirely virtuous and in line with the traditional marriage vows I witnessed yesterday. What is important is that all parties accept that there is such a thing as absolute truth, that sits above human perception. God as a ‘character’, is not just a cartoon beardy-man on a cloud pulling strings, but the personification of the concept that reality is an absolutely real promise.
If I stare long enough at the beautiful pink-granite masonry (complete with cherry-cocking), for long enough, I will see a face. When I look at my car, or the bus that will take me home, or the constellations in the clear mountain sky above, I will eventually see a face. When we look at the unflinching ruthlessness of an eternal wilderness, and the brutal harshness of the evolutionary judgement that the truth of the physical universe places on our species, and the terrifying understanding that an objective real world truth exists always just beyond our perception, we see a face.
That face, we call God.
So when someone says, ‘God is Love’, what is that? And what does it mean to love one’s country? Or your partner in marriage?
If you are lucky enough to have children, your marriage vows are also a promise to them. Something that is discussed far more openly in the US, from the federalist papers to modern times, is the question of how binding decisions are for future generations? Should a government be permitted to run up a debt that will not be repaid until long after the debtors are dead? Would you and your partner take out credit cards in your children’s names and run up huge bills?
The question of how a marriage bond relates to children, who do not choose their parents, is directly instructive when asking whether the Act of Union remains relevant today. We are undoubtedly the children of past generations. They created a Christian culture. The US a kind of Christian Sparta, with a polytheistic governmental structure. The UK a Chrisitan Constitutional Monarchy, a Monotheistic Empire.
To understand Scotland or the UK or USA today, you must understand their philosophical context, whether you agree with the viewpoints or not. The history of these nations of people is inextricably linked, and intertwined with the Protestant Christian Philosophy of the Hebrew, English and American revolutions. The battle we are now witnessing is the result of these cultures interfacing with the anti-Christian, Jacobin ideas of the French, Russian and Maoist revolutions.
Do these lumbering old Christian countries still have a place in the real world today?
For the Gaia-worshipper, God is mother nature. After a few winters at sea north of Shetland, facing 20 m-high (60ft) waves crashing over your ship day, after a terrifying day, you realise one thing thoroughly well. If God is nature, then Gaia has no love or care for me as a human being. If she is mother nature, then she is a manic-depressive single mother with a gambling problem, and the human race is her battered stepchild living under the stairs.
I take the view that we all have a God. Jordan Peterson has remarked many times publicly that Carl Jung found that ‘whatever is your highest value, is God, for you’.
And what of love? Is God love? is that unconditional love? The love of Jesus-the-hippie, who is interchangeable with the CIA-funded Dalai Lama, or the relatively racist Mahatma Gandhi? Or is it the tough love of the Old Testament?
Monotheism goes against human nature, in having the humility to accept objectivity. As relativism regains prominence in our culture, and we abandon Western philosophy, it is easy to miss this basic point. The natural human proclivity is to believe in ‘your own truth’, as the great awakening of recent years insists on calling our flawed individual perception.
Social media ‘enables’ (to use an American psychologism) our narcissistic self-indulgence in relativism. It ‘liberates’ us from the hard objective truth that there is an infinite objective single truth in the universe. The very fact that our perception of reality does not change reality, is the concept of monotheism.
Truth is the highest reality, and therefore the highest value. It is our judge. Our limitations and failings as human beings – our original sin – may allow us to feel truthful and strong for a time. To feel or appear ‘divine’. But ultimately, reality will kill us, and weed out our weak ideas during the relentless interface with the harsh but truthful judgement of reality in a dark and uncaring universe. This we call life. Evolution. Selection.
Monotheism is anti-narcissistic. The scientific method is a Christian Sub-Culture. Despite the best efforts of the Islamic Neoplatonists, or the Technocratic ‘Scientism’ movement of today, the philosophy of the Scientific Method cannot be sustained without a rejection of human authority. Only an acceptance of human fallibility can sustain enough love, for the pursuit of truth to have enough power to face its adversaries.
If God is love, then it is the love of truth that we worship. His harsh judgements, the reality of biological life.
Like the love for your partner, you will only know they love you back by the results of their actions. Words can mean very little, while the tiniest of actions can reveal everything. The empirical scorecard of relationships is something we take very seriously. It is probably the basis of all ethics. The biological root of our need for trust and our hatred of tyranny.
You will never ‘experience’ first-hand, from your partners point of view, whether they feel the same way about you. You must take their word for it. For this reason, we have evolved to read the body language, eye contact, tone and actions of other humans with devastating accuracy. We have evolved to believe that actions speak louder than words, to avoid the evolutionary disaster of mistakenly spending our time and resources raising the offspring of another under false pretences.
Love requires the acceptance of trust as a virtue. Witnesses to a marriage promise to protect and encourage that trust.
When our countries joined in an Act of Union, that nobody alive today has witnessed, is there any obligation to maintain that marriage?
The promise of fidelity in marriage extends beyond yourself and your partner. If I were inclined to cheat on my partner, and able to justify it to myself as many do, I still wouldn’t be able to do it because of my children. If you cheat on your partner, you break your promise to your children as well. The truth of human nature will ensure there are consequences for this betrayal.
Vows are sacred.
Resentment will never lead to freedom or independence. Divorce is not the same as liberation.
In the beginning, was the word.
The culture wars today are nothing less than the battle between the humility to accept that there is objective truth (and therefore morality) beyond our perception, and the ego-driven belief in relativism. The belief that human beings define truth, and that might is right. These beliefs are mutually exclusive, and cannot coexist peacefully. One attacks the other, by its mere existence, it stands as judge and opponent. The war is between evolutionaries and revolutionaries.
As tempting as it is to conflate the SNP with other National Socialist parties, founded in the 1930s with a weird symbol on their banner, their roots go far deeper than that. This is ironic for the party the Gaels used to call the ‘Sneeps’ (Gaelic for the turnips). They are Jacobin in their philosophical roots, not merely separatists (albeit turnip-flavoured). I believe the same philosophy of resentment is what drives the American radical left because it has the same roots.
Post Mel Gibson’s Braveheart, you’d be forgiven for thinking the SNP would be a party for ‘freedom’. After all, isn’t that what ‘Independence’ means?
The SNP never use the word freedom. The word is conspicuous by its absence that supporters make excuses like: ‘it would be too easy to ridicule’, or ‘freedom is a trite idea’, or ‘something to be discussed after independence from Westmonster’.
If SNP voters were of the libertarian mindset presented in the Mel Gibson version of events, the case for independence from the UK should be easier to make now than ever. The UK has made a self-defeating argument against the size of a large state, by arguing in favour of Brexit. The UK deliberately instilled fear in the population over covid, that it both knew and publicly admitted to being unjustified by science. The UK government went against the advice of scientific advisors when it came to vaccinating children, who are now suffering greater injury rates than in the past 80 years combined, for the sake of politics. The debt, inflation, suppression of free speech, etc.
If they were a party of freedom, the argument would be simple. Out of the UK, out of the EU, out of NATO. Small state governance, strong borders, sound money, perfect property rights, utopia ensues, etc.
In truth, much like the real William Wallace (A papist, who fought savagely against the will of the majority of Scots, to bring about a Catholic Absolutist Autocratic Monarchy), the SNP do not fight for what the modern American or English person would define as ‘freedom’.
No. They are revolutionaries. Jacobins of the oldest sort. They describe themselves as ‘Civic Nationalists’, to reassure us that they are not scary ‘ethno-nationalists’ who believe in a Scottish race. No, they want to, quote: ‘Make Scotland the most diverse country on earth’. In centralising each arm of the police into a single, centrally and politically controlled body called Police Scotland, they have shown us their love for the Jacobin ideal of centralising state power. Their economic policies, which would exclude us from EU membership due to the dizzying levels of deficit spending we’ve recently ‘enjoyed’, are certainly anathema to the Austrians.
The irony of the Scottish situation at the moment is that the ‘Conservatives’ in Scotland, wish to preserve a Union with the free market-loving, common law descended, property respecting, objectivist, the evolutionary result of the peasant’s revolt and the English Civil War, and the Restoration. They are conserving the English revolution.
The Scottish revolutionaries, as they have been for centuries, tend to be lapsed Catholics. Resentful at the limitations imposed on them by the church they feel betrayed them. Yet, still fond of continental-based power structures, they look to Europe, where consensus and fiat determine truth. Where standards are arbitrary, and the metric system itself demonstrates the will to power that recognises no higher authority than the majority. Where papal dictates, the Napoleonic Code and Civil Law, all point to a philosophy that says ‘we don’t mind arbitrary and tyrannical power, so long as we are the group who gets to exercise it’.
Egality? A fine idea, worth every price control, property seizure, or other sin to obtain because only two wrongs can make a right.
Fraternity? The kind enjoyed by Cain, Abel and Robespierre, perhaps?
Liberty? After the ‘Plus-One’ covid policies of Sturgeons’ governance the past two years, we must ask, liberation from what? An overdraft limit? Perhaps they should have spent all that money raising Scottish life expectancy to an age that should actually be worried about covid in the first place?
Revolutionaries conjure an image of the chambers of a revolver. They wish only rotation of the chamber so that their group can be the bullet on top. They do not wish to remove the threat of the weapon. They only want to change the positions of the player, not the game of power, itself.
That is why the SNP argue for ‘Independence’, and not ‘freedom’. They do not believe in freedom, and they are not offering any.
Their philosophy is not Scottish, it is anti-Scottish. It is communist. It is centralising, command-based, micromanaging puritanism. It is Jacobin. The price controls, regulatory capture and centralised control of the economy are already hurting after years of SNP mismanagement.
Resentment will never lead to freedom or independence. Divorce is not the same as liberation.
I am not opposed to the concept of Scottish independence, per se. But not an independence born out of the seething relativist resentment of the SNP.
If Scotland wishes to divorce from its partner, it should do so only out of a greater love for its people than that currently provided by England. Again, this should not be a hard case to make, if there were any actual love between the SNP and the people of the nation of Scotland.
The Hebrew revolution, the book of Exodus, defined our modern ideas of freedom and independence. It is worth remembering that the chapter begins with the Pharoah ordering the death of all first-born Hebrew sons, to maintain the social order.
Like our Chimpanzee ancestors, the Hebrews recognised that no human authority is absolute. They objected to the state having the arbitrary power of life and death over their children. They too were the sons of Adam and Eve and had equal access to the judgement of God, who is truth.
The Scottish enlightenment, and the English and American revolutions were based on the Hebrew revolution described in Exodus. It is the opposite of the Jacobin revolutions, in their insistence that truth is the monopoly of the technocratic state, platonic philosopher king, or autocrat of whichever political flavour. There are rules, divine rules, available to all and enforceable by all.
If the SNP ever want a clear majority, they should argue for freedom, not just revolution.
And those who argue to keep the Union, of either the UK or the USA, should pay attention to what is happening around us now. How are we under attack? Political correctness, banning words like Jesuit and Jew from Scrabble, cancel culture and HR compliance are attacks on the word. The propaganda surrounding the State, the UN, Climate, Covid and any corporation with the word ‘World’ in it’s title, is a subversion of the word.
How do you fight it?
Choose your words carefully, with truth as your highest value.