Kirsty Gunn: Multiple reasons to feel dismayed by our monoculture

I've just had an interesting letter from a writer friend. We have both been in discussion about this year's Booker Prize for novels and he, as a distinguished and well known author who has been shortlisted for the Booker in the past, along with a whole welter of literary awards including a great a great number that he has also won, was telling me how disillusioned he was by the entire process of prizegiving and its effect on our understanding of literature. 'When did it all get so dull?' he said. 'I suppose when literature was signed up as a polite, vaguely liberal, conscience-salving instrument of western globalisation.'

LONDON, ENGLAND - APRIL 02: Artist Damien Hirst poses in front of his artwork entitled 'The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living' in the Tate Modern art gallery on April 2, 2012 in London, England. The Tate Modern is displaying the first major exhibition of Damien Hirst's artworks in the UK, bringing together the collection over 70 of Hirst's works spanning three decades. The exhibition opens to the general public on April 4, 2012 and runs until September 9, 2012. (Photo by Oli Scarff/Getty Images)

I am inclined to agree. Capitalism does seem to have had its way with art. More and more it seems that the things that get talked about, whether its the price of Damian Hirst’s latest bauble or the fiction project that chimes precisely with the preoccupations of the chattering classes, have little to do with going out on a limb or taking risks or – despite all the talk of diversity – being different. It’s what another friend a number of years ago described as “monoculture”: the same people doing the same things and getting the same sort of attention – while the rest of us, the audience, the readers, the gallery-goers, are left being made to believe that this is all the culture there is.

It’s difficult to go on record about these kinds of thoughts, of course – and I won’t write down the name of the author who I’ve been talking about here for that reason – as one can come across as being bitter and small-minded. After all, even though he’s had that Booker shortlisting, and more than once, the writer I am referring to didn’t win it. And, for my part, I ‘ve never even been longlisted for the Booker Prize so I should probably keep my mouth shut altogether! But at the end of the day it seems crazy that we can’t come out with opinions about the working environments we inhabit, however they manifest themselves – whether in prizes or pay cheques – for the fear of being regarded as petty and envious and difficult. We have ideas, after all, we all do, about aspects of of the worlds we live in, whether we’re writers and teachers or bankers or builders. There are some things about what we do that we like, others seem dull or stupid or a waste of time. Why shouldn’t we talk about any of it?

Kezia Dugdale might be thinking along these lines right now. She’s nothing like a Corbynista and that’s why she’s no longer leading the Labour Party. Yet why should she have to be like him? But there’s monoculture for you. Politics is full of it. It’s like the clothes shops this time of year being stocked up with a certain kind of autumn jersey or a particular colour of dress. Woe betide if you want to wear bright pink in September – it’s only dark plum and navy for you, my girl, and Dugdale has had to make way for a smug and yet vague prototype of a leftist intellectual when she herself is just as clever, only in a different guise that’s not in fashion yet. It’s another way capitalism has wreaked dull effect on our intellectual lives, this thinking in visual terms all the time – and I haven’t even touched on the inevitable dumbing down of endless materialism being shoved in our faces by way of blanket advertising and highly sexualised television and screen media.

Scotland is a country full of diversity yet we’re contantly being sold some notion of “Scottishness” that’s the same for us all. There are these generally applied, monocultural concepts in play – like “land ownership” and “The Clearances” and “accessibility” – and we’re all supposed to have an automatic knee-jerk reaction to them, based on what we’ve been “tellt”, not what we think or where and how we live. Up where I am in Sutherland local shops and services – friends – are all devastated by the closure of big estates for the knock-on effect it’s had on employment and the local economy. They don’t think so-called “land reform” is such a great thing. It’s just a fancy way of making rural areas think things may be better for them as “the Scottish people”, not as individuals with generations-old ways of doing things and living in a way that we value.

Monocultural behaviour is rife throughout the management sectors of universities, too, places that have become bastions of conservatism where league tables rule and teaching is risk-averse. I was told recently at a discussion about an appointment at our own School of Humanities at Dundee, where I teach, that we needed to think in terms of “apples and only apples” when we considered potential applicants for a job. We wanted “sameness” apparently – if not in gender and in colour , for those features are surely, happily, in full representation in our places of education, though ageism is still an issue. “You want an orange when everyone else is an apple” I was told, about the appointment in question and I was arguing, to continue the high-flying metaphor, for a range of fruits in our teaching cohort. Real diversity, like the different places in Scotland that all have different kinds of people living in them, who speak in different ways, and do things differently – for all the talk about it – is actually not a quality that’s celebrated at all. Come into Waverley Station and all you see are signs in Gaelic and quotes from Walter Scott. It’s the very opposite of the myriad of qualities represented in the Scottish capital which are about Britishness as well as Gaeldom, Irvine Welsh as much as Enlightenment.

It’s a kind of over-management, surely, of our skills and ambitions and independence, that brings about this crisis of sameness, I think. At universities now, we have such “managers”. Quite what they manage, in practical terms that might benefit us as we go about our day-to-day lives trying to teach our students, is beyond most of us who teach, but there they go, making of education one big meeting with tick lists and “outcomes”. “When did life become so dull?” as my friend the author said. So one-size-fits-all in appearance?

As a colleague, Dr Gail Low, herself a meticulous post -colonial scholar whose academic life has been devoted to the study of differences and exploring all the wonderful variations and textures in writing, literature and cultural behaviour, puts it: “There is a now fetishistic management of management for its own sake. I think it comes from fear. Big businesses, like universities now, can’t afford to want what an individual does or thinks or says. It’s about planned outcomes, discounting the individual response. It’s about wanting everyone to fall into line.”