13 June 2013

Beyond The Cringe?

I vividly remember the moment when I first realised that social confidence is created not begotten, not an accident of individual psychology, but in great part, something we manufacture in the assembly lines of culture, family, and school. 

I must have been about sixteen or seventeen years of age. The scene was somewhat out of the usual run, though no great shakes. Part of the Young Enterprise scheme, pupils from a range of Glasgow secondaries congregated in a school hall, somewhere in the city. Formed of students from both state and private schools, representatives of the latter were coded in woollen blazers, dark and light blue, and green. The majority of state school students generally not. Initially, understandably, folk kept to their phalanxes and their friends.  An end was swiftly put to that.

Some diverting "team-building" enterprise, I think it was intended as, the six or seven schools were split up and muddled together for the task.  After half an hour, mission complete, a representative from each group had to take to their hind legs, and report back to everybody on their progress.  For most folk, this might seem a daunting enterprise, extempore speaking in a room festooned with unfamiliar faces. 

When the reports came in, familiar face after familiar face rose to address the assembled.  Blazer after blazer stood.  Most were boys.  Forgetful memory may be playing me false, but only a handful, only one or two groups from perhaps twelve or more, nominated kids from state schools for their spokesmen. A Hutchesons' Grammar School kid, a young lady from St Aloysius, and another, and another. Now, I know public speaking isn't for everyone, and for many, the very idea of having to do so sends a tremor of anxiety snaking up the spine. But even as a callow youth, I realised that attributing this strict pattern of speakers to chance would be woefully naive and incurious. It is probably significant that none of the colleagues who I asked about it, brimming with thoughtless confidence, found this spontaneous order in any way strange. 

This could, of course, be interpreted in a number of ways.  The cynical might see the self-entitlement of private schoolers playing out in it, thinking they are born to rule, brashly taking over.  There's undoubtedly a bit of truth in that, but only a half truth. 

Private schools have their share of ghastly, cocksure thickheads whose limitations, personal and intellectual, do nothing to arrest their assertiveness. But the more significant question, it seemed to me, is how do we foster a whole generation of kids who feel encouraged to speak out, to elbow past the ordinary emotional run of anxieties and inadequacies and speak up? Socially, how do we try to ensure that confidence and a sense of entitlement to speak and argue and make yourself heard is equally distributed across society, just as intelligence, wisdom, human decency and capacity for education is equally distributed? Having attended a wee primary school, of fewer than thirty five souls at its largest, I realise I'd come to take egalitarianism on this score for granted.  Folk obviously had different capacities and talents, but none of the appalling stratification of self-belief which unfolded, totally unremarked upon, that day in Glasgow. 

Worse, I found the same phenomena played out daily in universities, though here, I was more struck by the gendered pattern of contributions to my seminars.  In a recent interview in the Scotland on Sunday, Johann Lamont neatly skewered an experience I know several of my friends went through, only gradually realising that the big-haired public schoolboys in their classes were bladders inflated by hot air and shallow opinions. Their experiences also, inevitably, made me think twice about how I conducted myself in these spaces. If justice is concerned primarily with a just distribution of social goods, then space to speak has to be part of that.  Knowing your effect isn't always as straightforward as you'd like. In retrospect, at times, I dare say I'd have benefited from a slap. Or a gag.

On the first episode of Iain Macwhirter's Road to Referendum series of documentaries for STV, focussing on the period between 1945 and 1979, a number of speakers invoked the idea of the "Scottish cringe".  The concept made an appearance on the second episode this week too.  It has set cogs whirring. For my part, I've never shared in that inadequate sensibility, which makes me wonder if it is partly a generational thing which finds little purchase amongst those, like me, in their twenties and younger.  Contrawise, I wonder if my own experience is a false friend in this respect.

In my upbringing, there was no sense, for example, that speaking Scots was disciplined or to be regarded as improper, as I've spoken what you might call Scottish standard English throughout my life.  There is also, it seems to me, a significant dimension of geography and social class in the particular articulation of Scottish cringe which Elaine C Smith and others identify in Macwhirter's film.  Pared back, Smith expressed a sense that during the late part of the 20th century, west-central Scotland working class voices were missing from the public sphere, from drama, broadcasting and much else.  I've shallow roots in both, being by childhood rural, and until my middle twenties, rejecting the idea of class distinctions altogether as irredeemably reactionary, incapable of shedding useful light on our social and political circumstances.  Since, in the light of experience, my views have evolved, but if I was to feel a Scottish cringe at all, it would be unlikely to take either form. 

So which do you think it is? Are younger folk slowly, gradually, throwing off the shackles which bound their parents, going more confidently, more buoyantly beyond the Cringe, or is its lack of purchase just another coda of my entitlement and privilege?

9 comments :

  1. I think younger people are indeed throwing off the Cringe. This week I was interviewing young kids from disadvantaged backgrounds who are going to university. The panel was a fairly light-touch part of a process to see if the kids could get annual bursaries of up to £4000 whilst at Uni.

    All of them displayed a confidence that I never had at that age. They had ambition, not just for themselves, but for their wider community. The Cringe, if it can be seen as something that was widespread across Scotland, used to be particularly evident in the poorer areas of Glasgow.

    Based on what I saw this week I think the Cringe is in a terminal decline.

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  2. I'm not even sure what the cringe is, apart from a catch-all term used by nationalists keen to explain why most Scots express a preference (all things considered) for the Union: 'You feel British as well as English? Oh, the Cringe!'

    As for Elaine C Smith, I certainly cringed when I saw her diabolical old TV show - god in heaven. The odd thing is that when she did stuff outside Scotland, she was actually first class - she could more than hold her own with the likes of French and Saunders, but stick her in front of a camera in Queen Margaret Drive and the shtick about Larrson and the weans and Irn Bru and 'Blue Noses in the Night!' and what not would flow like chip fat off the cooker.

    By way of contrast, I remember the excitement of Chewin' the Fat and then Still Game and seeing home-grown stuff that was as good as anything from elsewhere. Nae hint of a cringe there.

    Whatever it is or was and whoever it affected, I agree it does not seem evident in younger Scots.

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    Replies
    1. "The odd thing is that when she did stuff outside Scotland, she was actually first class - she could more than hold her own with the likes of French and Saunders, but stick her in front of a camera in Queen Margaret Drive and the shtick about Larrson and the weans and Irn Bru and 'Blue Noses in the Night!' and what not would flow like chip fat off the cooker."

      Aye you're right Edwin, no hint of the Scottish Cringe there, eh...?

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    2. No hint at all! I was brought up on Chic Murray and Rikki Fulton and Stanley Baxter - no one ever invoked any 'cringe' with those masters. The Elaine C Smith show was just rubbish - what Tom Leonard (in another context) called 'bunnet hustling'.

      Yet when Smith got away from her own material (I assume she wrote most of it herself) she was excellent in political theatre and more general work - a classy actress in fact.

      BTW Doug the White Heather Club was never for the likes of us I suppose, but there was some rare talent there - Jimmy Shand was George Martin's favourite musician.




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  3. 'You feel British as well as English?

    I should explain that is an actual quote - the person addressing me was indicating that If I felt British, my joint Scottishness was an illusion. I was really an Englishman!

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  4. I think the Cringe is definitely in decline, and I put that down to an increase in exposure of Scottish culture in the media, as well as the existence of the Scottish parliament.

    Despite being a lifelong supporter of independence, even I have had those cringe feelings at times - I grew up feeling that Scottish music was embarrassing, rolled my eyes when my dad would try to learn Gaelic, and it always felt like anything that didn't gain wider UK acceptance was just parochial. But as I grew up, Scottish culture would get more exposure, and I learned to appreciate Scottish culture as more than just a bunch of beardy weirdies with acoustic guitars singing about the Blue Grey Coo or wee Stewart Anderson dressed in a kilt singing Culter's Candy.

    Of course, part of the reason I felt like that in the first place was because the media made it seem like Scottish culture = the White Heather Club. Nowadays, we have modern bands we can be proud of who don't feel the need to hide their accent when singing, actors who don't have to go down the Richard Wilson route of losing their Scottish accent in order to get work, and comedians who are unabashedly Scottish. And of course, we also have the king of the internet, Limmy.

    Wales went through a similar process, as the Manic Street Preachers have conveyed many times. They started out feeling utterly embarrassed by their Welshness, only for their eventual success to lead to an explosion of Welsh bands and Welsh culture in general. They themselves went from singing about how shit life in Wales was, to singing about "a deep true love of this country" and such like.

    Incidentally, it's noticeable that many of the countries that are said to have a cultural cringe - Australia, New Zealand and Canada to name but three - are former British colonies. It's almost as if it's deliberate...

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  5. I remember a 1st year tutorial on Politics at an old Scottish University. About 18 years ago now maybe... we had to submit essays on some subject, and we all did, bar the only public school boy. Instead he scribbled a bullet list of key points and argued (successfully) for an extension.
    The rest of us, about 50/50 boys and girls, all state school educated, were equally horrified, cowed, grudgingly impressed, and somehow embarrassed about not having the balls to do the same...
    Scottish Cringe? Absolutely

    2 years earlier, school mates were encouraged to apply for Oxford/ Cambridge. "I didn't think we were allowed..." they cringed.

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  6. I remember a 1st year tutorial on Politics at an old Scottish University. About 18 years ago now maybe... we had to submit essays on some subject, and we all did, bar the only public school boy. Instead he scribbled a bullet list of key points and argued (successfully) for an extension.
    The rest of us, about 50/50 boys and girls, all state school educated, were equally horrified, cowed, grudgingly impressed, and somehow embarrassed about not having the balls to do the same...
    Scottish Cringe? Absolutely

    2 years earlier, school mates were encouraged to apply for Oxford/ Cambridge. "I didn't think we were allowed..." they cringed.

    ReplyDelete