The book starts with an incident that occurred on one cold August day in Edinburgh, Scotland, 1696, when one inappropriate remark by a young theology student led to the relentless prosecution and eventual hanging of him by the authority-that-be of the day, the all-encompassing Presbyterian Church of Scotland founded some 150 years ago by John Knox, a devout Calvinist whose life-long mission was to make Scotland the "New Jerusalem" of the world during the days of fierce Protestant Reformation movement.
Rigid and uncompromising as it was, the Presbyterian church-state of pre-modern day Scotland did instill a deep sense of self-governance and common people's rights against the monarchy, as well as awareness and establishment of universal education (boys and girls must know how to read Holy Scripture, therefore nearly every parish in Scotland had some sort of school and a regular teacher), making Scotland's literacy rate the highest in the world (it was probably not by coincidence that Encyclopedia Britannica was first compiled and published by a group of Scottish publishers in Edinburgh), and sowing the seeds for its intellectual enlightenment movement during the 18th century, when Scotland enjoyed economic prosperity after its successful union with England at the beginning of that century.
The Scottish Enlightenment shared same humanist and rationalist outlook of European Enlightenment of the same period, with some firebrand ideas of its own, though.
For more than two thousand years Western philosophers had praised the primacy of reason as the guide to all human action and virtue, that the job of reason was to master our emotions and appetites. With one earth-shaking book, "A Treatise of Human Nature," David Hume, one of the most influential Scottish thinkers of the day, and some call modernity's first great philosopher, turned the theory on its head. "Reason is," he wrote, "and ought to be, the slave of the passions."
"Human beings are not, and never have been, governed by their rational capacities," he elaborated, "Reason's role is purely instrumental: it teaches us how to get what we want. What we want is determined by our emotions, our passions, or our desire to live according to the rational principles. We are, in the end, creatures of habit, and of the physical and social environment within which our emotions and passions must operate."
For Hume, self-interest is all there is. The overriding guiding force in all our actions is not our reason, or our sense of obligation toward others, or any innate moral sense, but the most basic human passion of all, the desire for self-gratification.
Now Adam Smith, another great Scottish intellectual of the day, and later recognized to be father of modern science of economy by many, was a good friend of David Hume's. He was somewhat disturbed by such characterization of human nature, for his insight of man came from a different school of thoughts, one held and infused in him by his teacher/mentor, another great Scottish thinker, Francis Hutcheson, who insisted morality is inborn, a gift from God and nature, not something that has to be imposed from outside, as Hume suggested.
What Smith eventually came up with was what he called "fellow feeling," a natural sense of identification with other human beings. When we see someone suffer, we suffer; when we see others happy and celebrating their good fortune, it raises our own spirits. "Empathy," in today's term.
"Nature, when she formed man for society," Smith explained, "endowed him with an original desire to please, and an original aversion to offend his brethren. She taught him to feel pleasure in their favorable, and pain in their unfavorable regard."
So being moral demands that we put ourselves in another person's place, and put another person in our place. It leads us to promote the well-being of others, by making them as happy as ourselves.
For Adam Smith, then, our moral life, as well as our cultural life, is a matter of imagination. The richer the inventory of objects for its diversion, and the deeper our own fellow feeling, the happier we become, but also the more we can perceive happiness in others. The rich man is the man with the most fertile imagination. By devoting all his efforts and those of his employees and tenants to his land or his warehouse of factory, he ends up producing far more than he can consume himself. Thus, without intending it, without knowing it, as if led by an invisible hand, the rich "advance the interest of the society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species," he said in his book "The Theory of Moral Sentiments," 17 years before publishing his other classic, "The Wealth of Nations" in 1776.
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The latter part of the book talks about the diaspora, or dispersion, of Scots around the world through expansion of the British Empire. From Canada (Nova Scotia, one of Canada's four founding colonies, is Latin for "New Scotland") to United States, South America, Africa, New Zealand, Australia, and so on, many Scots served the roles of valiant soldiers, shrewd merchants, prominent educators, devout missionaries, and hardy homesteaders that helped build and maintain the Empire upon which the sun never set.
One particular branch of Scottish migration actually occurred well before the British colonial expansion to the world. Beginning in early 17th century, many Scots were lured to settle in Northern Ireland on lands confiscated from Irish nobility by King James I, who had been king of Scotland before becoming king of England, as well as driven by famine and poverty at home, through the whole of the 17th century.
Waves of these "Scotch-Irish" (or "Ulster Scots," Ulster being the ancient provincial name of Northern Ireland) again began to move to British America in early 18th century, landing on Eastern seaports such as Philadelphia or Chester, then quickly expanding into the Appalachian Mountains, across southwest Virginia, North Carolina, and eventually Tennessee.
The habits of colonizing Ireland and seizing arable land from Catholic enemies carried over to the New World. Their insatiable desire for land, and the willingness to fight and die to keep it, laid the foundation of the frontier mentality of the American West.
Place names and language reflected their northern Irish or southern Scottish origins. They said "whar" for "where," "thar" for "there," "critter" for "creature," "nekkid" for "naked"... These were the first utterings of the American dialect of Appalachian mountaineers, cow boys, truck drivers, and back country politicians. The term used to describe them was redneck, a Scots border term meaning Presbyterians. Another was cracker, from the Scots word craik for "talk," meaning a loud talker or braggart. Both words became permanent parts of the American language, and a permanent part of the identity of the Deep South the Ulster Scots created.
Well known Americans of Scottish origin in the early pioneer days include Andrew Jackson, army general who defeated both Indians and the British army and the 7th President of the United States; William Clark of the Lewis and Clark Expedition to the Pacific Northwest; Sam Houston, soldier politician who led Texas to the Union. Notable modern day Scottish Americans include Andrew Carnegie, steel industry tycoon and philanthropist; Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of telephone and his namesake telephone company; and President Woodrow Wilson, an idealistic politician whose father was one of the founders of Southern Presbyterian Church in the United States.
Nope, MacIntosh Computer was not invented by the Scots, nor were the McDonald's restaurants, even though the names sound Scottish and both are tell-tale contraptions of modern world :)
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