He also recognises the crucial importance of education, pinpointing Scotland as ‘Europe's first modern literate society’ – and this, in turn, is referred back to John Knox's insane but thorough religious reformation.
He is – at least historically – resolutely pro-Union, and identifies the creation of Great Britain in 1707 as the primary enabler of the Enlightenment, something that ‘in the span of a single generation would transform Scotland from a Third World country into a modern society, and open up a cultural and social revolution’. That said, Herman does make a few helpful suggestions. Herman never quite escapes the sense of merely delivering a laundry-list of great names and inventions, most of which could be more or less grasped by consulting Wikipedia's article on Scottish inventions and discoveries. I said it was an eternal mystery one of the problems with this book is that the Scottish Enlightenment remains a bit of a mystery even after finishing it.
For two hundred years, from the start of the eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth, Scotland churned out ideas at a ridiculous pace: David Hume remade empiricist philosophy, Adam Smith invented economics, Francis Hutcheson invented modern liberalism, James Hutton invented modern geology, Walter Scott invented modern fiction…. But even more important were the new concepts and attitudes that made it all possible. Most people will point to the technology – television, telephones, macadamised road surfaces, pneumatic tyres, the bicycle, penicillin, Buckfast.
It's one of the eternal mysteries why so much of the modern world seems to have come out of this remote, rainy corner on the edge of Europe. Admittedly at the time this was somewhat disingenuous, since Nebraska even then had dozens of channels whereas Scotland had four (all of which were regularly interrupted by the fateful words ‘…except for viewers in Scotland’), but still, the point was made. During a school exchange to McCook, Nebraska, in the early 90s, my wife was asked whether they had television in Scotland.
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