Scotland's official embrace of literature reveals much about its comfortably stuck political culture, cosily immured from an increasingly illiberal world. newstatesman.com/ideas/2022/03/…
Nicola Sturgeon loves books. It says so on her Twitter bio, with her picture against a wall of colourful hardbacks.
The virtues of reading are also key to the government Sturgeon leads. There is a First Minister’s reading challenge, a nationwide project to “develop reading cultures” and encourage reading for pleasure.
The signature social policy of Sturgeon’s government, the “baby box” introduced in 2017, presents every newborn in Scotland with a free crate of “essential items, such as clothes, nappies and books”.
Viewed in a longer historical perspective, Scotland is adapting Victorian book-religion for the age of government-by-caring-vibes.
In this period of faltering religious faith, Victorian poet Matthew Arnold invented the school subject of English literature as a unifying national creed, refining middle-class taste while supposedly quelling social unrest.
If this was a defensive endeavour in Victorian Britain, a patch-up job as the dawn of mass democracy threatened to tear the social fabric, Scotland’s version is powered by hope rather than fear.
It feels more like Scotland’s introverted high-culture is comfortably stuck, while its literary scene carries an aura of exhausted optimism rather than early-days risk taking.
To actually achieve independence, Scotland and its artists will need to confront society's deepening illiberalism rather than hide away in lofty ideologies of the past, writes @hinesjumpedup. newstatesman.com/ideas/2022/03/…
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