Wild Mountain Thyme

How the idea of the nation has been degraded by modern identity politics

This article is inspired by a song.

More precisely, I was roused to write by an audience's reaction to a simple, traditional air; a ballad called Wild Mountain Thyme. It is also known by the repeated line from its chorus: “Will you go, lassie, go”. It was sung by Roy Williamson and Ronnie Browne — The Corries — sometime in the 1970s or 80s. Listening to the song, and to the audience, I am transported back to a time before Scotland’s 2014 Independence referendum, before identity politics, before the weaponisation of who we are and how we see ourselves started to warp our perceptions.

Before I explain further, please listen to Wild Moutain Thyme.

What I hear, as the audience spontaneously joins in with the song, is a comfortable togetherness, a camaraderie, a closeness born of shared identity, shared history, shared culture, and shared understanding. This, I contend, has been substantially lost in recent years due to contentious woke politics creating random, chaotic fissures in our society. Rather than shared cultural anchors, we have opposing poles. Left versus Right, Authoritarian versus Libertarian, Unionist versus Separatist, Christian versus Marxist, Traditionalist versus Queer. It is a fight over and about everything. Against that background, how can we find the gentle and voluntary harmony manifest in that simple sharing of a song?

If I am correct, and the Scots nation has lost something vital since the second millennium became the third, this takes us to the next question: What, exactly, is it that we have lost? Is it the ability to live in peace with ourselves as a nation, or is it belief in and understanding of what a nation is? In other terms, is the problem a temporary one of the present fractious times, or does it represent the passing of something real and important, intangible and vital, fragile and precious? The question, I suppose is this: can a nation remain healthy when it can no longer sing together?

This illustrates the complexity of the question “What is a nation?”. It is not simply a line on a map, nor is it a shared language. It is not tied to geography nor defined solely by history. It is not only family and DNA. It is not defined just by shared beliefs, values, and faith. It is not any of these things, yet it is all of them. It is a mix so intangible, so difficult to define yet so precious that men have, for centuries, been prepared to lay down their lives in its defence.

The nation and how to define it has, almost imperceptibly, moved to become central to contemporary politics. From Brexit to the migrant crisis, and from the Scottish Independence Referendum to the recent EU elections, the nation is key. This is because the nation, like the family, the Lord, and individual freedom, is under attack. It has been so since at least the 1960s with Herbert Marcuse and others leading the charge. Their assault was on the West, all of it. The free market economy, the family, the nation, and, of course, Christianity. His chosen weapons were many but the most vital was, what else, sexual liberation. It is not an accident that our present struggles include drag queen story time and the sexualisation of children.

All of this fragmentation of our society brings Marcuse’s vision of the destruction of the West closer. It also means we can share the same songs less often, and less wholeheartedly.

We cannot go back in time, and cannot wish away the fractures in our nation. What we must do, every one of us who values the intangible beauty of the nation, is to defend the love, gentleness, and strength that makes it real. Equally, we must oppose the application of solvents such as sexual liberation, queer theory, critical race theory, and all other toxic agents that can only destroy.

This will not reverse the damage that has already been done. But it will preserve a remnant of what we were as a basis for what we may yet become. This offers hope and good and useful work for us all to do.

Let us do this work with the same harmony, spontaneity, and grace as that audience from decades past.