There is, somewhere, an instinct to apologise, before beginning, before setting forth. It is a reflex, a neurodivergent reaction, to learned masking.
I shouldn’t, so I shan’t.
This brings on, reveals another instinct, related to the subject matter, equally learned, accultured, to also apologise for the likely lack of native language in it. But this is an attempt at dialogue, not flyting. I should, so I shall.
I’m sorry.
I will also follow another instinct, to compensate for that lack, as well as for the necessary scientific reference, by opening utilising other, equally accultured, literary, linguistic and poetic tropes.
I am the spastic hawk and the stricken dove, snared hare and wounded buck. High-functioning, high-masking, neurodivergent. All more and less than.
Poesy, evidenced position, automatic, edited. On ‘the colonised mind’ and what it means to contemporary Scots and Scotland, reflecting on signals and noise, on ‘new thinking’, ‘old thinking’ and divergent thinking.
While we stare down the loaded barrel of an accelerating Anthropocene, in oor wee bit hill and glen, oor street or close, wherever home is for Scots, as humans everywhere ultimately must, for some there is an almost inevitable impulse toward triage. While others, seeking routes forward, pathfinding while facing an overwhelming entropy, rooted in deep time, succumb to a particular contemporary malaise. The film-maker Adam Curtis dubbed it ‘oh-dearism’; not so much a scream into the existential abyss of our own making as a plaintive sigh of futility.
It echoes back and repeats, like philosophical or socio-political indigestion. It sounds something like the aphoristic maxim: ‘Well, if that’s where we need to go, we shouldn’t start from here, should we? Should we? Should we? Should we?’, ad infinitum, eventually becoming a shrill feedback loop.
It has created, alongside so many other tangled actions and reactions, fertile ground across the globe for compound collective self-harm. Sometimes, seemingly, for no other reason than to mute it, we stick sickly fingers in ears. Only to find the resulting tinnitus amplifies its anxious wails, adding to unbearable cognitive loads. It is after all, to paraphrase, a grand thing to get leave to live.
And so go the seeds of nostalgic appeal, into tilled minds. Both witting and unwitting, right and left -wing populist rhetoric, asserting there were times past, more grand, when we lived better. The assertion acts as proxy for charisma, albeit sometimes so evidently lacking in its proponents, erstwhile leaders.
With confidence, innate or mustered, they step out from collective wondering, of not knowing where to go, where to start or how we even got here. They step out and assert ‘I f***in’ do!’.
Ideas always, everywhere, seek to colonise minds. What and who they serve become an integral aspect of their propagation. Vigilance is, likewise, always, everywhere, advisable.
And so it goes, too, with the self-appointed battlefield medics of the Yes movement, the current iteration, post 2014, of the long fought and diverse campaign to restore Scotland’s independence. Rushing to apply triage without your consent. Whilst the world rushes on headlong, failing to stop, whether we want to get on or not.
For this Green ‘yesser’, writing this, taking pen to paper, asserting personal sovereignty over the disabling neurophysiological impacts of digital technology, forced thinking seizures cluster still, focal and cognitively disruptive. Despite the woodland surroundings, here in the Angus glens, a carefully chosen and cultivated environment, the covenant entered into for their peaceful enjoyment is understood in stark difference by other humans nearby.
Fierce, fossil fuel driven machines, erratic bursts from chain saws and strimmers, literally colonise irregular electrical discharges, agitating neuronal exchanges across a Broca’s Area. In spaces between, echoes of words, heard and read, intrude upon a mind appraising reactions in a brain of which it is also an emergent property. And of which the pilot remains conscious.
‘A colonised mind’, ‘a decolonised mind’, ‘anything intelligent to say’, ‘imagine this’, ‘your European friends’, ‘of Kenmure St, not Downing Street’ – colonising cognitive space too, rippling through schemas, signals bursting between the noise, handshake protocols between neurotransmitters and chemoreceptors. Drawing deeper too, from the well, past the amygdala and cerebellum, in the vaults of a back brain, of memory and learning.
Remembering John Playfair, Church of Scotland minister, scientist, mathematician and professor of natural philosophy, elucidating on James Hutton’s conceptualisation of deep time, dizzyingly throwing other, then strongly held, conceptions of divinity and humanity into stark relief, describing their impact on the Enlightenment gaze, looking over the stratified promontory of Siccar Point:
‘The mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far back into the abyss of time’
Meta sense memories swiftly followed, of writing the same thing. Examined on recall of cultural anthropological learning in the grand library bearing his name.
Undaunted yet humbled still, a child of mining communities, of kinship care and Orkney granny’s folktales spinning. Amidst the grandiose architecture and rows of busts, of men, of Enlightenment, of giants and shoulders. And the comforting mildew of all the words in all the books.
Regulating a nascent generation X impulse to burn it all down. In words or deeds, either would do.
Drawn from deep simmering rage, roaring into the chasm between two distant generations. Bridged by articulation of ideas into actions, driving industry and revolution, disrupting, radically and permanently, the planet sustaining them, giving life to us all.
It’s carbon and nitrogen cycles, ocean chemistry and bio-diversity, each the product of slow evolution, distilled over millions of years too. And we tinkered and tampered, extracted, consumed and belched. Stratified layers of abuse, to our host and to ourselves, once integral parts of its whole, now become parasitic.
Heralding in, those elders of Enlightenment, so consensus seems to have it, nation states, world wars and then the Great Acceleration. The sudden and dramatic jump in consumption, exponential rise in global populations, an explosion in the use of plastics and the collapse of agricultural diversity.
Now, snapped forward into fields of study those thoughts led this brain, this mind to. The very ones defining this age, the Anthropocene, in spine shuddering irony. We conjure ourselves as ghosts haunting a deep future. Decolonise this.
File it along with the colonisation of these lands and islands we call Scotland. It’s drowned coasts and inscrutable stones, long perplexing the minds of humans who live and have lived here. For nigh on ten thousand years.
See them through the lens of Graeber and Wengrow’s comprehensive and authoritative recasting of the world in which they sit, their scrupulous sifting through archeological and anthropological evidence, re-envisioning ‘The Dawn of Everything’, decolonising accepted Enlightenment wisdom.
Yet, those are not the wide parameters bellowed through comments below the line over at the National, a barometer and public square, where those who nominally want better for these demented lands, this place where we live. Who want better than echoes of empire. Asserting themselves as ideas, those loudest shouts, as alternatives, ‘new thinking’, disturbingly familiar to some old thinking, seeking themselves to colonise minds then actions.
No, narrow, tighter, convergent, directive, demanding, they borrow freely, without acknowledgment, from the language of psychopolitics, of sociology and anthropology and from literatures of liberation. Shake it all up and pour it through the lensed funnel of Scotland’s constitutional plight.
Of course, when it is there referred to, in this context, it should more accurately, surely, be as inner colonisation, or risk appearing to dismiss or diminish the academic foundations upon which it so liberally draws. A truly decolonised Scottish mind cannot simply refer to the Claim of Right, or its architects and stewards, or the sovereignty of the Scottish people, with assumed authority, expressed, unelected by them, to act on their behalf. To claim, in all earnestness, they know not what they do, for their minds have been colonised.
It takes a particular conceit of mind to claim both to decolonisation and to speak or act on behalf of the Scottish people, to make representation, to colonise their agency, without first, a priori, seeking their consent. Without first providing a mechanism through which verification of acting upon their settled will, or least that of a majority of them, can be established, can function. Particularly if demands are made of others to seek self determination, immediately, right sharp, because of what they express, what they think it means to assert that conceit
It is a much-constrained reference to colonisation, in the manner pursued, or signalling intent to pursue, which does not refer first to the prophets of decolonisation. First surely to Albert Memmi and the 1957 publication of ‘The Coloniser and the Colonised’. Then by way of the post-colonial and literary theorist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o and the 1986 publication ‘Decolonising the Mind: the Politics of Language in African Literature’.
Language is important here, as it was there, as it ever is. To speak of decolonisation without showing consideration of how Ngugi’s work tied language and culture to the material work of both colonisation and decolonisation is remiss at best. Ngugi stresses this, saying:
‘…language carries, and culture carries, particularly through orature and literature, the entire body of values by which we come to perceive ourselves and our place in the world.’
Decolonising a mind is a lifelong process, one in which it is necessary to be mindful that systems of domination and subordination are not necessarily easy to identify and persist. This is particularly so when they are situated in unofficial cultures, in interpersonal politics, in the negotiation of relation, of power, by individuals in interaction.
Scotland may be suffering from extended arrested decolonisation. Its sovereign people may indeed have long been subject to the bonds of what Ngugi calls ‘the English metaphysical empire’.
Our reflections upon and reactions to them, to the nebulous tendrils of the metaphysical and our so arrested decolonisation, must also take into account whether there was a distinct Scottish identity, maintained, promoted or even developed at the, so called, periphery of empire.
For good may be questionable but certainly less so for ill. Scots contributed more powerfully than their numbers would suggest to the processes of colonisation, westernisation and nominal modernisation at those peripheries.
Through their linguistic and ethnographic activities, particularly in the context of frontier missions, they had a considerable influence on attitudes towards colonised peoples. This was also particularly so in the nineteenth century activity, derived from Enlightenment thinking, of creating taxonomies and stereotypes for humans as much as for the natural world. It inevitably influenced contingent ideas about colonial frontiers, their administrations, labour policies and every aspect of colonised life.
We must wrestle first with these legacies and be mindful of what language we use, particularly if we continue to use language of subjugation and stereotyping, when we argue for the case of our own inner colonisation.
When we use the language of the coloniser to decolonise ourselves, we must also remain vigilant and mindful of where well intended academic institutions and projects have found self-reflection is key in this. Like them, we must remember to hold ourselves accountable through meditation on or serious thought about character, actions and motives.
Thus, reflecting on the Scots colonised mind, we must also take into account the colonisation of psychological study itself. It may be useful, by way of pertinent context, to consider the discipline’s intermittent revision of the Torres Strait expedition and its aims.
The expedition can be considered one of the foundations of clinical psychology. It may seem like the opening to a joke: a few anthropologists, some aspiring psychologists and a psychiatrist get into a boat and set off to Southeast Asia, in 1898…given the ramifications, though, it just isn’t funny.
A major objective for the exhibition team was to distinguish what was universal in human psychology from what was culturally specific to the western world. A significant observation was made that psychoses did not exist in the cultures studied there, except where they had been substantially ‘westernised’.
Even then, so the team observed, those with psychotic manifestations were quickly and easily treated by local shamans. As the field of clinical psychology developed, back in the west, this observation was subject to subsequent discredit. The chief observer’s name became associated with caution for students and psychologists, a case study in error.
A much later, weighty review of the evidence, in 2017, came to the conclusion that the observations were, in all probability, correct.
There are significant lessons, cautionary tales, there for decolonising the Scots mind. They seem particularly relevant to consideration of the Gà idhealtachd, conscious, willed and enforced British dismantling of the clan system, whether feudally influenced or pre-existing to that influence, and prohibition of Scots’ languages, dress and culture post 1745. Where do they sit in relation to the Law of Adomnán, as a Scots and Irish founded pre-cursor to human rights-based legislation, one of the first systematic attempts to lessen the savagery of warfare and violence as colonisation?
How many indigenous healers, spey-wives, witches, shamans were subject to colonising religious persecution and, if they or their practises survived it, then they or their culture bearers subject to ‘transportation’ during the (Highland and Lowland) clearances? What healing of the psychoses inculcated into the Scots colonised mind has been denied because of it? What, indeed, of minds colonised generally by state imposed organised religion and sectarian persecution promulgated by it?
To those questions, as of so many asked regarding colonised minds, no easy answers are readily available. Nor should any be derived through reductive reasoning or exclusion of voices from debate. Much nuance must be allowed.
If not, as we consider the psychopolitics of Scottish liberation, against a backdrop of increasingly global considerations, of climate, of finance and capital, of data and its ‘giants’, of technological ‘progress’, of their convergence into a ubiquitous, insidious and nefarious colonisation of neurological and cognitive capacity to serve politicised ends, we risk setting out from false premise.
And still, while there are those who step forward to say ‘I f****n’ know’ and I will speak on the people’s behalf for their minds have been colonised, there are undoubtedly other considerations to be made. Not least, if we must assert individual and collective agency, we must also allow for the decolonisation of our minds from the parasite of narcissism.
If we are to, wilfully and upon fullness of consideration, place Scots and Scotland in the context of colonised states and minds, amid the intensification in authoritarian treatment of subjects and populations – through warfare, abandonment, dispossession, incarceration, deaths or ‘capture’ of migrants in the Mediterranean Seas and English Channel, expanding networks of detention, deportation, prison systems, state sanctioned police ‘violence’, surveillance and counter-terrorism tactics, we must do so with a deep, reflective and nuanced understanding. With acute examination of these practices, where they relate to us and where we are complicit in them, where they are and have been concerned, including with violence and incitement to or facilitation of it, with overt and covert othering.
Every aspect of them, from inception to ‘conclusion’, renders populations and individuals as suspect, object and ‘unworthy’.
We must, as individuals and a movement, if our objective is to decolonise the means through which Scots and Scotland are governed, turn the full decolonising gaze upon ourselves. We must become able to account for the fullness of historical context, of management, of subjects or citizens, of populations and demographics, through both the material and ‘metaphysical’ colonising mindset. Above all, as a nation without statehood and as the individual and collective minds who conceive of it, we must always remember we have been both the colonised and the coloniser.
Of course, we must also acknowledge how histories of colonialism have played a central role in the configuration of modern ‘rule’, in the minds of both government and the governed. But we must always also be mindful of its complexity.
Our decolonisation cannot simply be viewed, in this context, as a historical remnant, to be expunged. It exists in, so should be viewed as placed in, a continuum of context, of colonial historiography and political geography, challenging the assumptions of a ‘post’-colonial world and its external/internal spatial distinctions. Amid widespread ongoing modes of colonialism, of both colonising and decolonising, acknowledging the complexities of foundational colonial historiography, we cannot simply see our place in the world, as Scots and as Scotland, collectively or individually, our minds and consciousness of ourselves, as haunted by a spectre which needs to be exorcised.
Likewise, with any mooted decolonisation project or endeavour, rooted in studies of empire and race, so we must ca’ canny.
The concept of inner or internal colonisation can provide a more nuanced, acute and necessary lens through which to view the plight of Scots and Scotland. These concepts have evolved to explore the relationship between complex, historically layered, subjugation and contemporary liberal government.
While racism remains a vital demarcation in liberal government, between forms of what is called, in internal colonisation studies, ‘worthy/unworthy life’, this is continually shaped by colonial histories and ongoing projects of empire in familiar, if not identical, ways. Unpacking the concept of internal colonisation and its intellectual history, into colonial historiography and political geography, it becomes relatively easy to see how unitary states such as the UK were always active imperial terrain and subject to forms of colonisation.
This recognises how knowledge and practices of rule were appropriated onto a heterogeneity of both racialised and other ‘undesirable’ subjects, within far colonies and across the islands of Britain. Internal colonisation remains, nebulous, shifting, diverse and dispersed under liberal empire. It’s practitioners, so mired in its continuum, as an integral aspect of its propagation, are also well versed in denigrating or dismissing even raising the concept of ‘empire’, both internally and externally, as an ongoing concern.
Treating supposed and nominally liberal government, in states such as the UK, as part of imperial terrain recognises the way in which knowledge and practices of colonisation have worked across multiple populations and have been insinuated, often over extended periods of time, in otherwise seemingly mundane, or even extolled as beneficent, ways. This brings complex, loaded and nuanced histories into a closer relationship of (re)making a present which takes fuller account of them.
We have enough of a societally othering history, to say nothing of how dominant in it has been and is a significant religious and sectarian legacy, politically and culturally as Scots, to understand (as well as to have the will to) we cannot simply other our fellow citizens, point an actual or metaphorical finger, or bring about a similar ‘laying on of hands’, and shout:
‘Begone foul colonised demon, begone all foul colonised demons, I decolonise you in the name of we the sovereign Scots people, as a sovereign Scots person and mind, for I have become decolonised’.
Those who would try, have no single, simple solution. No silver bullet or incantation to dispel what plagues and haunts us. They host more of the metaphysical, metaphorical jackboot, more coloniser than colonised, in the manner they intend, their minds host to a plethora of other parasites.
Yes, nuance is necessary and unavoidable, in decolonising both our individual and collective psyche. We will only come to fully understand our plight and how best to act, now and into an increasingly and existentially precarious future, through truly divergent thought.
We cannot, a priori, identify a single answer then provide an equally simple, deterministic means of achieving it. There be beasts and dragons. And precious few unicorns.