The 7 Sins of Scotland What’s Stopping Us From Being a Great Country? We Asked Seven Leading Writers to Name Our Vices the Big Idea

IN the film Seven, Kevin Spacey plays a demented moralist who goes around performing bespoke executions upon a septet of luckless modern urbanites whom he feels exemplify each one of the traditional deadly sins. The murders were medieval, but the idea is almost quaint – even the most dogmatic Catholics no longer tend to believe that a person deserves to burn in hell for the “mortal” sins on that list, such as lust, let alone the “venial” ones, such as sloth.

And while Protestantism has in the past been less forgiving, since it did not allow for the purification of those sins in purgatory, their place among the articles of faith has also shifted over time. From the cast-iron proscriptions first compiled by Pope Gregory the Great in the sixth century, to the punishments so vividly imagined by Dante, to the King James Bible and the separation of church and state, they are now considered archaic and simplistic, by Christians and secularists alike.

They might still be useful, however, in considering whether a modern country can be guilty of deadly sins – not necessarily in those Old Testament terms, but by persistently behaving, as a nation, or a people, in ways that hold it back from becoming the place it promises to be. Take Scotland, for example, where the prejudices born of religious and social history might themselves be considered obstructions to the new, devolved, independent, 21st century state that is trying to take shape around us.

We invited seven of this country’s leading writers to re-examine the deadly sins of modern Scotland, not as a means of damning the place to hell, but out of hope for ideas on how this might be paradise.

1: LUST BY JOHN BURNSIDE IF there were an Olympic event called Imagining The Worst, the gold would go to Scotland every time. Nobody does doom and misery like us, and nobody imagines the worst so readily or so cheerfully. The trouble is, we imagine the worst so well, we can’t seem to imagine anything else without throwing in a pinch of guilt and gloom for good measure. Which is why, for far too many Scots, premarital sex is either a drunken accident or a performance test, while sex after marriage is almost indistinguishable from housework.

That’s if we’re lucky. The all too common alternative is a drunk man wandering home to claim his marital rights with just the right mixture of guilt and anger to ensure that things do not go well.

Around a quarter of Scottish women suffer domestic abuse at some time in their lives: no wonder they prefer chocolate or a nice cup of tea to what the Chinese euphemism calls “flowery combat”. Meanwhile, Scottish men think about sex all the time, but when they actually manage to stumble as far as the bedroom, they do it so badly it hardly qualifies.

There are several reasons for this, I suspect, prime among them being the alcohol-as-aphrodisiac mentality and a male sexuality almost entirely constructed, directly or otherwise, from pornography. It’s a sad state of affairs, in the land of Robert Burns, (the world’s most popular love poet), but Scotsmen and Scotswomen just do not like or trust each other enough to make love, not war.

On the evidence of our grim and guilt-ridden view of sex, then, it might seem that lust is the sin least likely to be laid at our door – but that depends on how we define our terms. Most sin originates in a desire for too much of something good, either because that “good thing” isn’t as good as it ought to be, or we don’t know what to do with it. Lust works on exactly the same principle and the only cure is better sex. So, instead of staggering home drunk for a quickie with a semi-comatose spouse, or a clandestine bout with internet hardcore, we Scots need to discover our sensual, celebratory selves and remember that lust only became a deadly sin when we forgot its original meaning – which, according to the OED, was “pleasure, or delight”.

2: WRATH BY LOUISE WELSH WHO isn’t sick of it? The image of the belligerent, boozed-up, drug-fuelled Scotsman with a blade up his sleeve and murder in his heart. It’s as cliche’d as a see-you-Jimmy- cap and as true as a sharp knife.

Last year the UN declared that Scotland has the third-highest murder rate in western Europe, comparable with Azerbaijan, Israel and Iran. The year before, the World Health Organisation published a study stating that people living here are three times more likely to be murdered than those in England and Wales.

Caledonia is more treacherous than Midsomer, but our murders aren’t clever affairs. They are gang and drug-related or arguments that went too far between friends on a binge. Forget city of culture/ literature/style/architecture, home of the Enlightenment and pioneer on the scientific frontier. When the rest of the world thinks of us they imagine a clenched fist, a quick knife and blood on the pavement. The people most likely to suffer from this violence come from the same demographic as those most liable to mete it out: young men who carry a knife for protection.

Keeping them all in their bedrooms until they are 35 would lower the murder rate considerably, but it isn’t a feasible option. We’ve got to recognise and resolve the correlation between poverty, social exclusion, poor levels of education, exposure to violence and the propensity to get involved in crime.

Enabling young people to become articulate and making them feel that they have a future would be a good beginning. We’ve got to start respecting our teenagers enough to make them a priority. Sure, even the best and brightest of them are awkward customers, but they’re not natural born killers.

Louise Welsh’s latest novel, The Bullet Trick, is published by Canongate at GBP7.99. She appears at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on August 17

3: ENVY BY IAN BELL IT is not, I think, the slogan the tourist boards were looking for. The Best Small, Insecure, Relentlessly Boastful And Above All Envious Country In The World? Stick that in your brochure. We excel at it, though, in a perverse way.

When it comes to envy we are, if you like, world-beaters. Even an amateur psychologist could tell as much from the sheer quantity of wha’s-like-us rhetoric that has become our contribution to international discourse. It is supposed to sound like pride; too often it sounds petty and parochial.

A great deal of it is directed southwards, perhaps inevitably. The small country sat next to the bigger country, with some tangled history to explain, is always likely to talk big and think little.

The claim, broadly, is that there is nothing England has that we could want or need. The badlykept secret is that we are envious, much of the time, and obsessive to boot.

Why else go on about all those inventors, empirebuilders, industrialists and writers we used to – this may be a clue – “produce”? Why else the self-advertising “defiance” towards a neighbour whose population mostly couldn’t find Dundee on a map and, moreover, couldn’t care less?

England doesn’t think much or often about Scotland. In these parts, roles are reversed. It amounts to sibling rivalry of the worst sort, and the rivalry is based on envy.

What’s worse than having a bigger brother too busy to pay you much attention? And who would you rather be: the big kid or the little kid?

English folk, even their politicians, mean no harm by it. Where our envy is concerned, that’s perhaps the most galling part. It doesn’t make us “racist”, but it confirms us in our fixation, and in our parochialism.

A good review in London, of any description, is still worth more to most Scots than the applause of their peers, even as they claim to disparage metrocentricity. Ambition is still identified as success in the Great Wen, and there is a Fifer in 10 Downing Street to prove it.

At home – a real giveaway – all this is held in contempt. Bad enough to succeed in Scotland; far worse to succeed anywhere else, in England above all.

So we stew, emotionally, talking wistfully about “our place in Europe”, or our “role on the world stage”. We are, if you like, forever trying to peer over the shoulder of the big kid at imagined vistas beyond. Much of the time we can’t see beyond England and the forces of history and chance that made it bigger, richer and vastly more influential in the world than we have ever been.

Naturally, we even have a term for that sort of defeatist talk. We call it “the Scottish cringe”. It seems, bizarrely, that we are either cringing or boasting relentlessly, simultaneously.

Try that for a national psyche. Envy can be a spur, obviously, but it has left Scotland unable, too often, to shift its gaze from its own small navel.

Ian Bell is Scotland’s columnist of the year

4: GLUTTONY BY ALLAN GUTHRIE IWRITE hardboiled crime fiction. That, believe it or not, brings certain expectations. When readers find out I’m teetotal and don’t eat meat, they are often shocked and disappointed. What’s this got to do with the seven deadly sins of modern Scotland? Well, it’s all to do with having a belly. Useful in a knife fight, but otherwise it’s something of a hindrance. And I should know.

Me and takeaway food go way back. I moved into a new flat once and it took six months before I realised the cooker didn’t work. How’s that for a cliche? Up until then I’d been living on takeaway pizza, varying my diet with different toppings. And once a week I’d have fish and chips from the chipper on the corner. When I moved again, it was into a flat right above an Indian takeaway. Not fair, is it?

I kept slim by not eating breakfast. Went for the continental option instead: a couple of wake-up cigarettes and half a dozen cups of strong coffee.

My attitude to drinking was pretty continental, too. Most nights would see me propping up a bar after work. Mind you, in mitigation, I started drinking pretty late in life. I was 14.

Fast forward nearly 20 years and I’m chain-smoking roll-ups, drinking every night, dining on takeaways; living the life of the single Scottish male.

So what happened? How did I become such a disappointment? Well, my body rebelled. Refused to take any more crap. About seven years ago I stopped drinking, stopped smoking, started to eat more healthily. Maybe one of these days I’ll even do some exercise. Not sure I can be bothered, though.

What? Ah, well. Sloth’s even easier than gluttony.

We’re a small nation, and in terms of sport the odds are stacked against us. But I wonder what would happen if we all became veggies, gave up smoking and drinking, started exercising even?

Maybe we’d end up with a football team we could be proud of. Mind you, would winning the World Cup be the same without the promise of an almighty piss-up for weeks afterwards?

All pie in the sky, of course. With chips.

Allan Guthrie’s latest novel, Two-Way Split, is published by Polygon at GBP6.99. He appears at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on August 27

5: AVARICE BY DENISE MINA DON’T support Scotland’s bid as host for the next House-boastie Olympics.

Resist! Buy a house and rip out the original features, carpet the bathroom in lemon nylon, Artex every wall and ceiling. When you meet people, tell them you live in a down-and-going area, deny the existence of the corner deli until the cock crows thrice. Because without decisive action, this modern evil will consume us all.

Look to London: all casual talk is of house prices, “desirable” areas, decor and extensions. Once people have knocked through every possible supporting wall, they start buying extra houses they can’t possibly live in, as holiday homes, or buy-tolet investments.

But accruing money isn’t the real reason we are all obsessed with house-buying. Property is a form of social currency, a way of gaining status among our peers. Who really goes on a TV property show because they can’t find a house? Sellers pay to advertise: they are hardly keeping it a secret. And no-one watches because they want tips on how to look at three houses and then buy one that wasn’t in the programme. That frisson we feel when we watch is about house avarice. We want to know how much better our property is than the GBP79K flat in Hastings, or how vulgar the people who bought the GBP800K barn conversion were. It’s all about us, and our place in the pecking order.

I know people who have no intention of moving, but regularly check the estate agents’ websites, ashamed and yet drawn to peer at schedules of houses they can’t afford. When we were selling our last home it was obvious that several of the viewers were simply enjoying a day out. No-one fraudulently claims an interest in secondhand sofas or unwanted sewing machines. It’s a feature of house- ownership only.

I blame successful people for house prices tumbling unsustainably upwards. As the pall of civic shame gradually lifted from Scotland, returning exiles from London or New York realised they could buy a listed Scottish castle for the price of a Chelsea garage. Together with the bankers who move to Edinburgh and the new breed of Scottish parliamentarians (or “Gravy-train c***s”, as my dear friend Nicola has it), they caused a massive rise in house prices.

And now the market has a life of its own.

Everyone likes to think they have made money by sitting tight and watching television, but it’s the equivalent of your kidneys rising in value: you need them, and if you did sell them, you’d need to buy other ones and they’d cost a packet too.

No-one is better off and we are all much more boring. If we must compete, let it be over something that matters:

break-dancing, athletics, competitive eating. At least the stories would be more entertaining. Who gets St John’s Ambulanced- off during a house viewing?

Denise Mina’s latest novel, The Last Breath, is published by Bantam Press at GBP12.99. She appears at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on August 14 and 17

6: PRIDE BY FREDERIC LINDSAY LIKE Wilde’s Gwendolen, searching for something scandalous to read, I recently turned to an old diary entry of mine, from 1997. I have always been conscious of the self- censorship that limited Scottish aspirations, not least in the media. “A newspaper article claims BBC and STV only make situation comedies which will be networked, ” I had written. “Programmes won’t even be considered unless they are acceptable to London-based commissioning editors. Mark Bolland, BBC Scotland head of arts, at a ‘crunch lunch’ with BBC executives, will be pushing ‘Celtic whimsy’, since urban Scottish locations are ‘out of favour down south’. Similarly, Sandy Ross, controller of entertainment at STV, has gone to Roy Clarke of Last Of The Summer Wine for his new proposal for networking – ‘I would say there’s still a resistance to Scottish voices’. Reading all this stuff, I thought: who with selfrespect could be bothered?”

This self-censorship, perhaps derived from a failure of pride, still sets the agenda. Scottish audiences are wary of more autonomous programming because they don’t understand that the pap passed off on them at present is pre-chewed for a London taste.

Back in the 1980s, while finishing my first novel, Brond, I berated myself for being a fool. I’d given up work to write it, and if it didn’t get published it was difficult to see what the future might hold. Despite that, the book grew into a thriller which, in a way that is still unique, gave a sympathetic account of Scottish nationalism.

Once published, it had some success, and 20 years later has just been re-published. Yet, if I’d had any shrewd sense of self- interest, I wouldn’t have written it.

It is possible that self-censorship wouldn’t, for a clergyman, come under the label of moral turpitude. But it limits integrity of effort in every field where the choices are made outside the country. With this in mind, a knowledgeable auld wifie in a Glasgow housing scheme might well complain: See us?

See self-censorship? It’s a sin, so it is!”

Brond is published by Polygon at GBP6.99

7: SLOTH BY EWAN MORRISON GLASGOW looked resplendent in the morning light. I fancied a walk to take in the changing shape of the city. I stepped out the door and slid on the ground. Dogshit! Ten feet away, a neighbour reached for his door keys as his mutt proceeded to repeat the procedure. The man paid no heed and started to enter. I called out.

“Aren’t you going to clean that up?”

The man’s face seethed with resentment.

“The council comes on Monday, ” he replied, leaving me dumbfounded as he went inside. Hadn’t he heard of doggybags?

I stood there thinking of how I’d lived in parts of the world much poorer than this, where people picked up their own shit. Communal gardens in Brooklyn, where neighbours of different classes organised childcare and car-shares and street festivals all without the help of the council. I thought of Ibrox and rows of graffitied derelict houses, windows bolted up, and how even in Lebanon people didn’t destroy their own homes and wait for the council to get them a new one. I thought about the problem of the Marxist legacy in Scotland.

The Scots love to see themselves as a downtrodden people who support their fellow oppressed. As “the common man” with a proud socialist past. Red Clydeside.

This made sense when Marxism was a vibrant force, when in revolutionary terms the project was not to reform society, but to bring its crisis to a head, to, as Trotsky said, “make things worse before they can be made better”. But Marxism is dead, and revelling in how downtrodden you are makes no sense now that there is no revolution to solve everything.

What happens then is that this negative thinking becomes pure resentment. A perversion of thought occurs when we find national pride in our failure and hate those who try to make things better.

We rely on the British state while backstabbing the English. We abuse our bodies in drunken rage and whinge about NHS waiting lists. We sneer at the wealthy and the healthy and those who try to raise themselves up. We demand a totally paternalistic welfare state that will clean up the shit we have let sit there for a week in miserable protest against a world that we assume is unchanging and the same everywhere.

I cleaned up my neighbour’s mess and thought that the first step towards independent self-governance cannot be one that leads us, again, into the same old socialist crap.

Ewan Morrison’s novel, Swung, is published by Jonathan Cape, GBP11.99.

He appears at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on August 25

Originally published by Newsquest Media Group.

(c) 2007 Sunday Herald. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.