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Land, Power
and National Identity
Modern Russia and the Spirituality of
Nationhood
- a View from
Scotland
a theological reflection commissioned from Alastair McIntosh
of the Centre for Human Ecology, Edinburgh, Scotland,
by Dr Dmitry Lvov, Academician-Secretary of the
Department of Economics,
Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow
Autumn 1999
I know no Russian and you know no
Scots
We cannot tell our voices from the
wind
The snow is seeking everywhere: our
hearts
At last like roofless hearths that
it has found,
And gathers there in drift on
endless drift,
Our broken hearts that it can
never fill.
- Hugh MacDiarmid, Farewell to Dostoevski
in A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle.
1. Introduction
2. The Spiritual Vocation of Nationhood
2.1 Russia: “I glimpse again in you that mightier power”
2.2 The Spiritual Basis of Power and Nationhood
2.3 Saint Andrew - National Identity in Russian-Scots Mythology
3. The Political and Intellectual Validity of Spiritual Insight
3.1 Spirituality and Russia - a New Body of Political Knowledge?
3.2 Taproot versus Grassroot Politics
3.3 Religion and Statecraft: the Challenge to Modern Leadership
3.4 The Problem of the Status of “God”
3.5 The Liberation of Theology
4. Biblical Economics of the Judeo-Christian Land Ethic
4.1 Land and Productivity in Contemporary Russia
4.2 God’s Passion for Land Economics
4.2.1 Creation
4.2.2 Providence
4.2.3 Covenant
4.2.4 Fall
4.2.5 Redemption
4.3 Some Objections to a Liberation Theology of Land
5. Land, Nationality and Empowerment in Scotland Today
5.1 Medieval European Origins of Feudal Tenure
5.2 Landed Power and Highland Clearance
5.3 The Modern Scottish Land Reform Movement
5.4 The New Scottish Parliament’s Legislative Proposals
6. Case Studies in Scottish Experience
6.1 The Isle of Eigg Trust - Developing Vision
6.2 The Harris “Superquarry” Inquiry - Reverence for Nature
6.3 The GalGael Trust - Community Building
6.4 People & Parliament - Discerning the Vocation of Nationhood
7. Conclusions
7.1 Honouring yet Freeing Spiritual Traditions
7.2 Bringing Mir Down to Earth
7.3 The Profit of the Earth for All
7.4 Sanctification
Foreword,
Introduction & Afterword
About the Author
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Notes &
Translator's annotations
Click here for pictures from the
seminars
Click here for Russian iconographic pictures
I am honoured to be able to respond to the invitation of
Dr Dmitry Lvov, Academician-Secretary of the Economics Department of the
Russian Academy of Sciences, to write this reflection on the relevance of
Biblical insight to the question of land economics, power and the national
renewal of cultural identity in Russia today.
This opportunity has come about through Fred Harrison of
the Centre for Land Policy Studies. He was aware of my involvement with land
reform on the Isle of Eigg and elsewhere in Scotland. Here, after 900 years, we
are finally taking steps to abolish the feudal system. The legislative
programme for our newly re-established Scots Parliament is committed to making
it easier for land to be transferred from unaccountable private ownership to
democratic community trusts[A1] where
this is the will of local people. The Scottish Parliament’s first White Paper[A2],
published in July 1999, is therefore on land reform. It pledges rights of
access[A3] to the
land and “sustainable development of [the] community as its primary objects.”[1]
Like the Russian mirs, and in a manner that resonates with the principles of land
value taxation, these community land trusts, of which there are now about ten
in Scotland even before the legislation takes effect, use rents for the benefit
of the local people. Residents become, in effect, their own secure tenants. No
longer can such communities be controlled by the dictates of those whose sole
qualification to own land is the possession of disproportionate wealth. No
longer is part of a peasant family’s earnings applied to finance the idle
lifestyles of a rich landlord whose primary interest is to secure a return on
capital whilst exploiting the resource, wherever possible, as a vehicle for tax
avoidance by calling it a “business.”
During the last decade of the twentieth century, the main political
parties in Scotland have come to recognise that a people’s relationship to the
land is of central importance to creating the conditions necessary for
community cohesion and ecologically sustainable development. We Scots have come
to understand that land is not just of economic importance. It is also vital to
our cultural, psychological and spiritual wellbeing. Land is the primary
contributor to our sense of belonging as a peoples[A4]. From
a sense of belonging we derive our identity - our sense of who we are. National
identity carries values - the guiding principles of a people or peoples. Only
when equipped with these can citizens be expected to develop responsibility for
both the community and ecology of where they live. Accordingly, any programme
aimed at sustainable national development - any attempt to recover national
identity, pride and values - must address very carefully the potential to
create integrity[A5] in
people’s relationship to the land. As a Scots folksinger, Dougie MacLean, puts
it, “You can’t own the land; the land owns you.”
Looking beyond Scotland, privatisation and
collectivisation are two polar-opposite approaches towards relationship with
land. This text, based on recent Scottish experience, proposes community
ownership as a third way, galvanised around bioregionally[A6]-defined
geographical areas. However, in the absence of a robust intellectual framework,
the principle of community ownership could be seen as merely backward-looking
parochialism by political leaders whose scale of remit must address national
issues at a global level and within a wide plurality of sub-cultures. I
therefore want to suggest that a pattern of land tenure that builds upwards
from the local in the manner of subsidiarity[A7],
provided it is not exclusive of the wider national concerns, is the very
opposite of “backward.” Furthermore, I want to suggest that there are
psychological and spiritual reasons for believing that if a people’s identity
can be firmly grounded in a place with which they have a sense of belonging,
the characteristics of that place will contribute to the strengths necessary to
cohere also as a nation. But for this
to rise beyond petty ethnic rivalry it is necessary to have a vision and
understanding of nationhood that affirms core human values. It must do this
whilst simultaneously accommodating diverse sub-cultural streams.
It is my experience in community empowerment[A8] work
that certain principles in Biblical theology - whether we believe in “God” or
not - are powerful in offering the constellating[A9] vision
to achieve necessary integration between land economics, political power and
national identity. Scotland has already learned much from Russia through her
poets and political thinkers. As we Scots, like Russians, find ourselves
rethinking national identity, perhaps there is also something to be offered
back. In making a modest attempt at this I shall address the following
structure.
1.
Provide outline ... as follows, by text section
number:
2.
Explore with respect to Russia and Scotland the
ancient but little-understood idea that nations, like people, have “soul,” and
that cultural renewal proceeds from distinguishing the higher spiritual
vocation[A10]
of nationhood from its degraded “fallen” state.
3.
Discuss the intellectual validity of using
spirituality - the inner ground of being from which our profoundest concerns
arise - as a basis for understanding national vocation.
4.
Consider what the Biblical understanding of
these principles has to offer in the modern world, looking not to those
oppressive forms of religion that have been “opium of the people,” but rather,
to a “liberation theology” that has emerged partly from the confluence of
Christianity and Marxism in countries of the South.
5.
Review land tenure in Scotland today as a critique
of European feudalism and therefore, as a warning of the dangers of
neo-feudalism.
6.
Offer four case studies of the application of
spiritual methodologies to cultural renewal. These are community land ownership
on Eigg (pronounced “egg”), environmental protection with the Isle of Harris
superquarry public inquiry, urban community building with Glasgow’s GalGael
Trust, and People & Parliament -
a process by which some 450 community groups in Scotland carried out a values
discernment exercise with which to inform the new Parliament of national
aspirations.
7.
Conclude by recognising that whilst different
needs will apply in Russia than is the case in Scotland, spiritually informed
community empowerment may nonetheless strengthen people in their relationship both
to the soil of local place and to the mountainside of nationhood. If God is
kept out of politics the nation will fail. If God is informally at least
allowed in, politics will be difficult but, arguably, sustained by hidden
wellsprings of life that nourish the deepest roots of our common humanity.
Today Russia stands at a cultural turning point. The constellating
energy that has crystallised national identity in the past has weakened. The
wisdom of centralised collectivism has been called into question. The West’s
proffered alternative of advanced capitalism is suspected of being at worst a
Trojan horse for resource colonialism; at best, a stimulus to
marketing-manufactured greed that would socially stratify society by replacing
the ethic of co-operation with divisive competition. The option of a “fair
trade” economy has been left unexplored, trust has broken down and vision,
without which the people perish,[2] is
blurred. The result is a society that has become compromised in its capacity to
know life’s joy. Life grinds on, but for too many citizens it falls short of
being “life abundant.”[3]
There is a sickness in the soul of the nation. The soul is
too weak to engender the depth of responsibility necessary to build social
cohesion and environmental sustainability. The soul is being preyed upon by
external interests, internal mafias and numbing apathy. The soul is heavy, old
and tired. We all know that this is true - Russians and non-Russians alike know
it.
I speak here of “soul,” and we can even accept, can we
not, that it is somehow meaningful to talk of issues of national despair in such
terms? Indeed, what other vocabulary grips the heart deeply enough? What other
way is there to understand the present crisis but as a crisis of spirit, aye[A11],
of the very spirituality of nationhood?
And so, let us cradle
[A12]the
soul and consider Russia. Let me consider it from the standpoint of a Scottish
nation that knows how much your people love our greatest of early-modern
national poets, Robert Burns. Let me consider it from the standpoint of a
nation that, for 300 years, has had its national aspirations suppressed and
colonised through collusion with an imperial project - the British Empire - but
which, as I write these words, is restoring its own Parliament and redefining
its sense of national vocation.
Allow me, then, to accept your invitation to look east to
Russia. And as I look through and beyond all the pain of present times - all
the pollution, corruption and meaninglessness - let me say and know that I
would be saying it for many of my fellow Scots - “I glimpse again in you that mightier power.” Not, please note,
“mighty power,” as in the military or imperialistic sense; but “mightier
power,” which is something else. This quotation is not my own. These, rather,
were the words with which Scotland’s greatest and best-loved modern poet, Hugh
MacDiarmid, chose to address the Russian soul. I would like to say a little
about MacDiarmid if I may? His work better than any represents the depth of
common insight that perhaps resides between our two countries.
MacDiarmid clearly saw a relationship between the Russian
and the Scottish national psyche that reached to metaphysical depths. Our
countries’ mutual love of poetry embodies this. In his poem, First Hymn to Lenin, from which my
just-quoted line and the title of this section of text is drawn, MacDiarmid
makes an astonishing but revelatory assertion. He says that “the flower and
iron of the truth” that Lenin stood for was nothing less than spiritual. It was
“The work of Christ that’s taken over-long to bring.”[4]
It is not for me to judge here whether MacDiarmid’s
appraisal of Lenin was wisdom or folly. Indeed, MacDiarmid’s diffidence about
facing up to and distancing himself from some of the excesses of old-style
communism lost him many friends, and rightly so in my opinion. What does
concern me here is this archetypally Scots poet’s profound understanding of the
spirituality of nationhood - what he called “a mystical sense/ Of the high
destiny of a nation.”[5]
This capacity causes him to be quoted almost daily in public life in
contemporary Scotland just now as we rethink nationhood with our new Parliament
that has substantial powers devolved from Westminster. To Scots, it is
unsurprising that a poet should have such a place in politics. Poetry has
always been vital to our affairs of state. It lubricates the connections
between power, people and the soil. “A Scottish poet,” MacDiarmid once wrote,
“must assume/ The burden of his people’s doom,/ And dare to break their living
tomb.”[6] In
other words, the poet must intercede with those forces that would bring death
to a nation. She or he must free the wellsprings of life. Like all true “bards”
or poets who speak to the soul of a nation, MacDiarmid knew that only spiritual
renewal could refresh that weariness born from the historic burdens of fortune.
He saw this task as requiring what he called, “The poetry of one the Russians
call ‘a broad nature’/ And the Japanese call ‘flower heart’/ And we, in
Scottish Gaeldom, ‘ionraic.’”[7] In
his Second Hymn to Lenin, MacDiarmid
asserted that, “Poetry like politics must cut/ the cackle[A13]
and pursue real ends,/ Unerringly as Lenin.” And he addresses Lenin directly.
He urges Lenin to make his politics one of a poet’s depth of engagement with
soul: “Ah, Lenin, politics is childs’ play/ To what this must be.”[8]
In using poetics to actualise the spirituality of
nationhood, MacDiarmid saw that the power of a nation was vested in the very
nature of its land. He poured vituperation upon those who, “Cannot see
Scotland/ Cannot see the Infinite/ And Scotland in true scale to it.”[9]
With a refreshingly honest diffidence about his spiritual subject-matter he
said, “Let men find the faith that builds mountains,/ Before they seek the
faith that moves them ... These stones [in the wilderness that he, like Christ,
wandered upon] go through Man, straight
to God, if there is one.”[10]
And he related national identity to an understanding of wild nature that in its
totemism reveals the bard as tribal shaman:
I cried: Here is the real
Scotland,
The Scotland of the leaping
salmon,
The soaring eagle, the unstalked
stag,
And the leaping mountain hare.[11]
In his evident passion for the Russian soul, MacDiarmid
went far beyond his controversial membership of the Communist Party of Great
Britain. He referred to the “Celtic Union of Soviet Republics”[12]
and reached out, I think it would be fair to say, to the very core of what been
called, “Holy Russia.” MacDiarmid’s vision for the Scottish limits of his
Celtic Union was to “unite Man and the Infinite.”[13]
“I shone within my thoughts,” he said, “As God within us shines.”[14]
His First Hymn to Lenin faces
unflinchingly all the suffering of the world - the “agonies in the cosmos
still.” And yet, he says, the gift of never fully yielding to despair is, “your
secret, O Lenin, - yours and ours.”
The snow may build in drift upon drift upon the hearths of
embers chilled. But to MacDiarmid it will not freeze “our broken hearts that it
can never fill.”[15] Joy
will resurge. His is a theology of insistence. The hearth’s fire will rekindle.
The soul itself, as his Fist Hymn to
Lenin concludes, “is the power in which we exult,” for -
Every fool has folly enough for
sadness
But at last we are wise and with
laughter tear
The veil of being, and are face to
face
With
the human race.[16]
To understand the spiritual dynamics of nationhood such as
bards like MacDiarmid seem to be in touch with, it is necessary to explore the
spirituality of power. For the past three years I have been invited to lecture
on this to 400 senior military officers from many different countries on the
Advanced Staff and Command course at the Joint
Services Command & Staff College in England. Allow me to use my lecture
material here, noting that these are personal views and not those of the
college. My specific remit there is to explain to army, air force and naval
officers how it is that pressure groups like the land reform or anti-nuclear
movements, which renounce the use of violence, nevertheless succeed in exerting
considerable influence over the operations of government. My interest in
sharing this understanding is to propagate knowledge of the dynamics of
nonviolent action. This is important not just for pressure groups, but also for
nations. That is why I am willing to share such understanding with those who
presume to guard the soul of nationhood - the armed forces of states associated
with NATO and equally, through the Russian Academy of Sciences - even though I
may differ from both these in my personal objectives and methods. Gandhi urged
open-ness in following the principles of nonviolent action. It reduces fear,
builds trust, and who knows, possibly wins adversaries over.
Both non-governmental pressure groups (NGOs) and the
governments to which armed forces and cultural institutions are accountable are
in the business of exercising power to influence the nature of social reality.
All would usually claim to be working for peace. In Britain, the supreme
commander of the armed forces is Her Majesty the Queen. Central to her title as
sovereign is “Defender of the [Christian] Faith.” As such, an oath of military
loyalty is, at its deepest level, a spiritual oath; an affirmation of faith.
I find at staff college that most senior officers are
thoughtful women and men. Many appreciate the spiritual underpinning of what
they understand to be their vocation. They are willing to give considerable
attention (and a very warm reception) to considering the spiritual dimensions
of power. They are willing to face the spiritual implications of subordination
in a command structure to sovereign powers that, rightly or wrongly, may
require them to lay down their lives ... or take life.
In presenting my analysis to them I develop the spiritual
critique[A14]
of political power that is given in the American theologian, Walter Wink’s
trilogy, Naming the Powers, Unmasking the
Powers and Engaging the Powers.[17]
These are now summarised in one excellent short volume, The Powers that Be.[18] Wink argues that power is central to
the spiritual expression of life. It constellates or crystallises reality. It
might be seen as the will to be. We
are familiar with power’s exterior expressions in people, institutions,
buildings, nations and natural processes such as the growth of a tree. But it
has also, according to Wink, an interior dynamic. This interiority is
“spirituality.” Such spirituality underlies the outward manifestation of
things. In other words, outward forms of reality are shaped by their inner
spirituality. This is certainly not to deny the importance of molecular
structures, genetic sequences, and the laws of physics. It is simply to say
that spirituality is at the root of all these things. It accounts for certain
of the emergent properties that arise from systems that would not have been
expected when anticipating only the sum of component parts of a system.
Spirituality is, for example, the difference between an aggregation of carbon,
water and a few other compounds and a human being.
The following matrix illustrates how power finds
expression through reality. Based on Wink’s theology, I suggest that it has an
interior, spiritual face and an exterior, physical face. This is shown on the
downwards y axis. Through both of these faces power can then be expressed via a
dynamic that can be physical, psychological and spiritual. This is shown moving
right along the x axis. Peace, I suggest, is a process by which a nation’s
expression of power shifts from left to right along this spectrum.
Spectrum of
Socially Expressed Power
|
Level
of Power |
Physical |
Psychological
Type I |